Housewifing Around: Little Victories : Discovering Awesome Household products

Today I bought medical gloves to wear for house chores. Specifically for any use of beach products or cat duties/doodies. I slapped on the green nitrile gloves, got inside our bathtub and sprinkled Comet all over and started scrubbing away. I got really into it. Within about two minutes of finishing, the bottoms of my feet had slightly swelled, my legs had feathery currents running up and down up from toes to knees, I was sick to my stomach, nauseous, my head was pounding. The chemicals had seeped up my bare feet, paying no mind to the hand protection I wore, and penetrated its way up.

Our bodies absorb everything and our feet are no exception. To most people, these chemicals and toxins build up over time and your immune system will start figuring out what it is and find out by what process to get rid of them. If too much builds up you will get sick, down the road. With an autoimmune disease progressing in my body, it immediately acknowledged unlawful entry and planned an attack toward my own body. I've known for a while I must go natural on home cleaning products, but I doubted they're effectiveness.

But it's a good day. I really didn't have much faith that homemade cleaning products could be any good, but I figured it was still something I had to look into being at how transparent my pores could be to anything around me and honestly, the tub was in dire need of a serious scrubbin'. Remembering back on my favorite book on domestication, No Hassle Housecleaning, I had learned about cleaning with tea tree oil, a natural powerful antiseptic big corporations are slapping the sticker their flammable liquids. Additionally, I now have cat babies and they're the ones closer to the floors we clean with toxic materials; a reason many pets are also getting diseases in this modern world. Oh yes, your dog may have lupus too. Inconceivable!

I bought a few ingredients for very low prices, some I already had, once my Target floor cleaner had been used up. I looked up a recipe online and found this wonderful blog article and recipe:

BEST FLOOR CLEANER EVER

white distilled vinegar
distilled water
tea tree essential oil
baking soda
spray bottle
Optional - essential oil for fragrance - peppermint, grapefruit, eucalyptus, lavender, etc.

Obviously, sharing the recipe isn't my method of persuasion. But I promise it was better than the expensive natural cleaners my mop was chugging through. So, what are the hang-ups you might have?

EFFECTIVENESS
Amazing! Stains that had been on our apartment floor since before we moved in were cleared out. A bit of baking soda smooths grit and leaves a polished gleam. It takes some tweaking -more oils for me, waaay less baking soda -but it leaves the floor (and counters) sparkling! I couldn't stop finding surfaces to clean. I was so excited I almost sprayed Chev Chelios...the cat.

SCENT
Your house will not smell like salad dressing. This was an important one to me because I DO NOT Like that acidic smell and am easily nauseous. The good news is that the scent of vinegar fades and leaves behind the aromatic smells of the tea tree and/or the optional additional flavor you add on. You must use the tea tree to clean and disinfect, the rest are just for additional aroma. I had peppermint on the shelf so my house ended smelling fresh. I did notice you have to shake up the bottle before each use or it'll smell of the smell of vinegar takes longer to fade. I wanted it to smell stronger of peppermint, stored in my pantry for fresh breath, digestion, and muscle pain, so I added double the drops it called for. An added plus is that peppermint repels bugs,roaches, and other creepers. Even without an additional oil though, there will be a clean overall feel about the place.

PRICE
The above ingredients are all you need. If you have a home water filtration system you're set in that department. If not, buy...

Distilled Water - Free or by the gallon. $0.65 cents. $0.25 for refills.
Distilled White Vinegar, buy by the gallon about $2 or 3 dollars. Will last a few months.
Baking Soda - $0.78 per box.
Spray Bottle - $0.98
Tea tree oil - Starting from $8.99 and up at Vitamin Shoppe if you can't find a health food store. Will last forever.
Optional essential oil - $4.89 for Peppermint (good for repelling bugs and creepers

CONVENIENCE

You have a start-up fee of about $15 or less and don't have to replace the oils for a long time.
The larger the sizes of vinegar and oils, the more you save.
It serves wonderfully as a floor, stove, surface, multipurpose cleaner.
It's safe enough to eat off the floor.
The pets may feel free to lick the linoleum, if they're into that.
Tie a red ribbon around it and it makes a cute homemade gift for all your "green" friends, ill family members, new moms, etc.
The oils for other purposes as well, like ailments, aromatic burners, base massage oils, and bath and foot soaks.
You can clean barefoot and not have to worry about dry yucky feet.

As you've read, I've been fighting my health issues since December, but it's taken me this long to pull a simple recipe together. However slow at it may be, start allowing the idea to simmer that chemical free is better, and nature has always been superior, without the side effects (and the side effects do come to stake their claim one way or another). Maybe in a few months or a year you'll be ready to try it too and love it as well. I'm started to round up more ingredients already, like alcohol and borax, and see where that leads me.

Personally, I'm taking this experience as proof I can confidently venture into more homemade cleaning products, like bathtub, oven and glass cleaners that don't require a Hazmat suit to have a sparkly smell-good home. I just had to share.

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