I Might Be Enjoying This A Little Too Much

After I informed the world that I’m going to use the month of February to replace my traditional household cleaning agents with homemade, (hopefully) safe cleaners, I was feeling motivated.  So, I went to the bookcase for my book on do-it-yourself home cleaning and read through the “recipes” for household cleaning.  I made a list of things to shop for and headed to the store.  I only found one item that was on my list: lemon oil.  The other things I was hoping to find were almost exclusively for laundry recipes and they didn’t have them at my trusty neighborhood store (though they did have an entire aisle dedicated to “green” cleaning products, 2/3 of which were laundry related, all astronomically priced).  I’ll have to keep my list and look elsewhere.

In the meantime, lemon oil is exactly what I needed to make my dish soap.  The recipe for dish soap is so simple it should be illegal.  20 oz Liquid castile soap + 30 drops lemon oil = Done.  I put it in the bottle that we’ve always used for dish soap and it’s sitting by the sink right now!  I’ve used it a time or two already and I really like it.  I haven’t had to tackle any seriously greasy messes yet, just a slightly greasy cookie sheet which my soap whipped into shape with no trouble.  I also haven’t had to fill the sink with soapy water yet.  This I’m thinking could prove disappointing since castile soap doesn’t have a foaming agent added to it and won’t build up into that giant sink-o-suds that normal dish soap produces, it just sort of makes the water milky instead.

But, wait!  There’s more!

Today was cleaning day so I thought to myself, “Self, you should see what new thing you can cook up to clean with!”  After much consideration I decided on toilet bowl cleaner…Because I don’t have any commercial cleaner, but I do have all of the ingredients to make my own.  So, into the toilet bowl went 1/4 cup of vinegar, 10 drops of tea tree oil, and 1/2 cup of baking soda.  Reward:  Awesome fizzing action, nice non-toxic scent, and (after a little scrubbing action) one sparkling toilet bowl.  Also, I felt a little like a scientist.  A janitor scientist.  Like Will in Good Will Hunting except my genius thing would be science instead of math.  You know.