Adventures in Cleaning

Well, this is the second time for me to write this post. The first time I did it I clicked on Publish Post during teh 5 seconds my internet was down and so I lost it :-(. But, I'll try to remember everything I just wrote.

This morning I went cleaning crazy. My chore for the week is bathroom cleaning so that got me started. The catbox was overflowing again, EWWW! so it took me 30min just to clean that out (with 4 cats in the house our automatic box needs cleaned about about every other day).

Anyway, first I made some countertop kitchen cleaner. I had made one before with baking soda and water but it left white streaks, so I made a new one with 1 cup vinegar, 3 cups warm water, and a pinch of dish soap. It worked really well (see my clean countertop :-).

I then decided to try making dishwasher detergent (since it's cheap and easy and we do about 2 loads of dishes a day in this house). That one was 1 cup borax to 1 cup washing soda....and my dishes came out great!

Next I decided to try out the laundry detergent. This was a little more of a process, I used the following blog to help me out: http://heartkeepercommonroom.blogspot.com/2006/03/laundry-soap-our-recipe.html So, I made 2 batches. One as recommended above using borax, washing soda, and Fels Naptha soap (a laundry soap). But since the Fels Naptha had a scent and I wasn't really sure what was in it, I decided to try out the recipe using Dove Soap (sensitive skin). I'm not sure how that one will work out, but I'll let you know. With my front-loading washers we only need 1 Tbsp of solution per load, pretty cool!

Oh, and I also used my water and tsp of baby shampoo solution for mopping the bathroom. The tile came out looking great and I was able to use the water to pour over the plants afterwards (although it did rain shortly after so they didn't necessarily need it).