Saturday, January 5, 2008

New Year - Fresh Start


Hey - hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season! We did - I'll be posting another day on some of the eco gifts I received!

Every year over the holidays I 'spring clean' my house. Obviously it is no where near spring here in Northern Ontario but I like to start out every year in an organized & clean house. So far we've been living in small quarters so it has never been a huge ordeal - about one or two days worth. I clean out closets, drawers - you name it. The basement is always the biggest task. Most stuff goes to goodwill but some does end up in the landfill. For the CLEAN part I use good ol' fashioned vinegar and baking soda. What you see above is my staples. The spray bottle is half vinegar/half water with a few drops of tea tree oil. I use that as my all purpose cleaner. Currently for dishes I am using Ecover - it is nice but in the past I have used a canadian brand Nature Clean that I will likely go back to using when the Ecover is finished. For my floors I use hot water with a big douse of vinegar and lavender essential oil. Baking soda with a bit of Ecover is used to scour my sinks and tub.


For our bathroom I use Nature Clean Toliet cleaner. It seems to work well enough but with any all natural cleaner it seems I have to clean the toliet more often then not. I was using Method as my all purpose bathroom cleaner but when it was finished I just filled up the bottle with the half vinegar/half water with essential oil concoction. The tub gets cleaned with the above mentioned baking soda/dish soap paste.

There you have it - a clean house with no toxic chemicals or fumes lingering around! This keeps our indoor air quality clean and most importantly I am not flushing down toxic waste into our precious waterways!

6 comments:

dabomb said...

How cool...a fellow Canadian. I've used up most of my mainstream house cleaners and am using vinegar, baking soda, etc. as well. I use borax to clean my toliet, floors and bathtub. Works great. My husband prefers Comet and the battle continues.

Theresa said...

Hooray for Nature Clean! I really like their products and I can get most of them at the local Sobey's store now. I also use baking soda and vinegar, which are excellent for so many things.

Also, I was tipped off by another blogger ("Everything Turns Up BP") a while ago that Arm and Hammer baking soda is tested on animals, so I've switched to another brand of baking soda these days.

Theresa said...

I see you are from Edmonton too, dabomb - cool! I will have to try borax for cleaning the toilet and tub - those seem to be the toughest things to clean with natural cleaners.

Hippie Girl said...

wow - i will definately not be buying arm & hammer baking soda any more!!

Veggie said...

I use baking soda and vinegar most of the time now.

Thanks dabomb for the borax idea, sometimes I need something a little stronger for the toilet.

How can we tell which brands of baking soda are tested on animals?
What brands are good?

Anardana said...

I only use natural stuff too :)