ohdeardrea natural living: all purpose cleaner diy
All Natural Cleaner Recipe
 
Why we use it:
Mixing your own household cleaners is cheaper than the alternative, better for the environment and it eliminates the worry over having potentially harmful chemicals in the house for yourself or with a very curious two year old.
What you’ll need:
  • 1/2 gallon of water
  • 1/2 cup of distilled white vinegar
  • 1/4 cup of baking soda
  • 1/4 cup of lemon juice
  • essential oil of your choice (we prefer lavender)
  • spray bottle
How to:
 
Start by mixing the vinegar and lemon juice inside the spray bottle. In a separate container, mix the water and baking soda. Slowly, add the water/baking soda mixture into the spray bottle. Be careful, it will bubble! Lastly, add 3-5 drops of essential oil to the bottle, depending on how fragrant you want your cleaner to be. Now just spray it onto a rag or directly onto a surface and clean til your heart’s content.
Enjoy!
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Happy wednesday, guys! It is wednesday, right? I think. Either way it’s actually sunny here this morning! Well, I’m excited to share a bit of a new (probably, hopefully weekly) series I’ve been working on. With this whole cookbook jazz, I haven’t had a whole lot of extra time (or not the time I would like, for this anyway) for adding more natural living posts. I have a very, very long list of them— but not the extra power to make them happen right now. BUT luckily— I have pretty awesome, equally crunchy??! friends that can help me out.
Emily isn’t a stranger to this space— though if you’re newer here (in the past year or so) you probably seen her much. Emily and her (strangely similar family) is now living in Brooklyn. I mean, I’m doing my best to convince her to come back to her homeland of South Florida— but we’ll see. Emily is an illustrator working in visual merchandising and design. She’s a mom. She’s a babe. A Floridian. Like me, she’s a big believer in living a more natural life: breast-feeding, cloth diapering, co-sleeping, the whole sh-bang. I like her a lot. And she’s the first non family member I’ve really trusted with my kid, if that says anything!
I think you’ll like what she brings here 🙂
You can find more of Emily’s work: HERE

 

Illustrations by Emily De Nicolais exclusively for ohdeardrea. To see more of Emily’s work, click HERE

11 Comments

  1. Thank you. I will try this when we run out of our other stuff. I use your deodorant recipe every day and I love it. One question I have (and maybe you'll get to this some day?) is what you use with mildewy or stained items. I use cloth rags in my home as you do, and I put them in a special bucket in our kitchen. By the time it's ready to wash, that bucket is pretty gross. I usually add a half cup of bleach to the washing machine because nothing else works.

  2. I love this spray, going to make up a bottle for our house:) My husband is always teasing me because I believe most things can be fixed or cured with vinegar- most of my skin products are made with pantry items.. Vinegar for the win:)

  3. This is brilliant, thank you! I never thought to add essential oils but that's a great idea. I'm going to whip some of this up tomorrow.

  4. I totally believe in "natural" cleansers, but pre-mixing an acid (lemon, vinegar) with the base (baking soda) renders them both completely useless – when you mix an acid and a base, you get a salt and water. You lose the cleaning power of each when they're mixed before being used to abrade a dirty surface.

    • Hey! You're totally right. An acid and a base mixed together can cause neutralization of both parts. But, in this case we aren't using enough vinegar to neutralize the baking soda. What we end up with is a cleaning solution that's basic, like a lot of household cleaners. Even if they did neutralize and become water and sodium acetate, it'd still be an effective cleaner, since water is a universal solvent and sodium acetate serves pretty well as an abrasive for scrubbing away dirt and scum. So either way, you're good! Thank you so much for commenting. We hope you'll try it out!