Happy March! As you may already know, I’ve made March a green cleaning month for the blog! That means every week I’ll be sharing two green cleaning recipes with you. By the end of the month, you will be more than ready for spring cleaning. I hope you’re excited. It only makes sense to start with a homemade all purpose cleaner. It’s so versatile and easy, but better than that, it only costs 50 cents to make!

After all, you need a cleaner you can grab in a pinch and use to clean any little (and sometimes big!) messes. Sure, you need specific cleaners for different things, but my all purpose cleaner is one of my cleaning staples, and the perfect cleaner to start out with.

I’ve made an all purpose cleaner before- and I loved it! But for green cleaning month I’ve done a lot of research- and I wanted to update my homemade all purpose cleaner to make it even more effective. Plus that was one of my earliest posts, and I like to update my pictures and style anyways. So I hope you like the new and improved recipe!

Ingredients:

• Baking soda: dissolves dirt and grease, gentle and non-toxic, deodorizes
• Borax: all natural and sustainable cleaner, disinfects, anti-fungal and keeps away bugs
• Dish soap or liquid castile soap: surfactant, dissolves dirt and grease
• Essential oils: for scent, and depending on the oil, can have different properties like being antibacterial, anti-fungal, etc. (I used lemongrass)

I’ve been trying to keep my cleaners more pH neutral. This cleaner has both baking soda and borax, so it is mildly alkaline, with a pH of about 8.5. This is approximate and based on the pH strips I used to test it.

And it is super effective! Just check out the picture below:

I’m always embarrassed to show before and afters like this… my baseboard was so grimy before! But it looks clean and great now. I don’t know where all that grease and grime came from, but it looks so much better cleaned up now. And it was persistent kitchen grease, so this stuff really packs a punch!

Seriously, you can’t get much better than that for 50 cents. And I recycled an old spray bottle for it, which I always love to do. This cleaner is my new favorite!

Let me know how making your homemade all purpose cleaner goes for you!

Want more green cleaning recipes? Check out all of my green cleaning month recipes here!

Supplies Used in this post:

The post Homemade All Purpose Cleaner appeared first on Pins and Procrastination.

Our bathroom was getting pretty dirty, so I figured it was a good time to write a post about green bathroom cleaners. Well, it’s actually such a long post that I’m going to have to split it into three parts. So this is part one, and you can read part two here, and part three here.

Bathroom cleaning products are some of the worst offenders when it comes to harmful chemicals:

• Butoxydiglycol: toxic for the reproductive system
• Alkyl C12-18 dimethylbenzyl ammonium chloride: Highly toxic to aquatic organisms, considered acutely toxic
• PEG Compounds: harmful to human nervous system and can harm development, potential carcinogen
• Artificial Fragrance: artificial fragrances can indicate up to 4000 ingredients, which can range from causing allergic reactions to being carcinogenic
• Isobutane: irritant to eyes and skin, may be toxic to human health

And that’s just to name a few.

Am I the only one who gets dizzy when I use commercial cleaning products? The fumes make me feel awful. When I use the cleaners I make myself, they just smell like lemon, sometimes with a hint of vinegar. Amazing. I love not feeling like I need to wear heavy duty gloves and a mask on my face to use my cleaners. No dizziness, no awful fumes, benefits for everyone. And don’t be fooled by all the commercial disinfecting products that make you think you can’t get rid of bacteria with gentler products- all these products are antibacterial.

Plus green cleaners are very inexpensive to make. The seven green cleaners in this three part series use only five different ingredients: borax, baking soda, liquid castile soap, white distilled vinegar, and lemon essential oil. And they all cost less than a dollar to make.

Here are all the recipes put together in one image. The post below goes into more details and has lots and lots of pictures, but this is the post at a glance:

So, first things first, let’s get started with an All Purpose Cleaner.

Green All Purpose Cleaner

This will be the shortest section, because I’ve already covered this awesome all purpose cleaner in a previous post. That post also contains a free printable label, so be sure to check it out!

So, here is the recipe for this green all purpose cleaner:

• 2 cups all purpose cleaner
• 2 tsp borax
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp liquid castile soap
• 5-10 drops essential oil (preferably an antibacterial oil like lemon or peppermint)

Here is how my sink looked after being cleaned with this cleaner. Nice and shiny. I love this all purpose cleaner.

On to our next cleaner!

Continued on Next Page

The post Green Bathroom Cleaners Part One appeared first on Pins and Procrastination.

What a wonderful weekend this was! My boyfriend’s mom, who has been traveling the world for three months, finally came home. So we got to spend Easter together and it was a really lovely day.  I learned that I am really terrible at Easter egg hunts. But it was fun to spend together and we had a great time.

Also- something exciting happened for me as a blogger- my homemade dishwasher detergent tabs post was featured on one of my favorite blogs: Living Well Spending Less! Thank you so much!

So- on to this week’s post! I set out to make a good all purpose cleaner. For a while now I have been using a store-bought all purpose cleaner that professes to be green and natural, but I still do not feel great about the ingredients. So it’s time to replace it!

It’s amazing how these brands charge you more for green cleaning products in stores, but when you make them at home they are usually cheaper than even the brand name products! One batch of this cleaner costs 21 cents (may vary slightly for you depending on how much your water costs- I grossly overestimated the cost of the water so it’s actually closer to 16 cents). That’s better than even the dollar store cleaner!

You only need a few simple supplies and ingredients!

For this recipe you will need a few simple ingredients:

• Baking Soda: great all purpose cleaner, naturally deodorizes, gentle scrubber, absorbent
• Borax: natural disinfectant, natural deodorizer, contributes to the strength of other basic cleaners or buffers the pH of alkaline cleaners, naturally occurring mineral that is sustainably mined (keep away from children and pets and don’t ingest)
• Castile Soap: great all purpose cleaner, cuts grease, made with all natural vegetable oils and is biodegradable
• Your favorite essential oil (optional): for scent, and depending on the oil can also add other properties like antibacterial (I like lemon for my cleaning products)
• Water

I cleaned my stove with the cleaner- here is what it looked like before and after using this cleaner

Here is the full recipe:

Here is what my kitchen counter looked like before and after cleaning

I went to work with this cleaner in my kitchen and I am pretty happy with the results! It was able to loosen and clean even the crusty stuff on the counter without much work on my part. And it left my stovetop and counters looking nice and shiny!

I also put it to work in the bathroom- and it worked great in there too! All the ingredients in this cleaner are so versatile it is truly an all purpose cleaner- it can be used on counters, appliances, floors, plumbing fixtures, or whatever you can put your mind to.

Plus, it has the added benefit of not being harmful to your health or the environment. Could you ask for more from your all purpose cleaner? Well, I guess you could ask it to do the work itself, but I haven’t quite figured that one out yet.

This is what the label looks like on the bottle

If you want to try this cleaner, don’t forget to get your free printable label!

The post Natural Homemade All Purpose Cleaner (Plus free printable label) appeared first on Pins and Procrastination.