Cleaning Recipes: Carpet freshener

You can make your own carpet/furniture/curtain/bedding freshener out of just water and your favorite laundry fabric softener. Put as much or as little fabric softener as you want into the spray bottle and fill the rest with water. i would put just maybe an inch of fabric softener. It is much cheaper than buying the powder that you put on your floor and then buying a separate one for your furniture or bedding. It's a quick way to run through the house and make everything smell nice and fresh out of the dryer!

Cleaning Recipes: Counter Stains

For those stubborn stains that you can sometimes get on your counters, especially if your unlucky like us and have very light colored counters, I have found a great concoction to get them out. For instance, I've had a stubborn rust colored stain on my counter from a pan that was left sitting over night. I could have gotten the stain out the next day, but life gets ya busy, ya know?

To get the stain out, put some dish soap on it first and smear it all over the stain. Next rub in some baking soda and make a paste of the two. Next, pour on the alcohol and then vinegar. use your scrubbing brush to scrub it in and let it sit. You don't have to let it sit, because it does come out after only a minute or two of scrubbing, but if you have other things to do then you can let it sit and go back to it. It gets the stain out like new!

I have also used this on a wooden table to get marker off. I would just not let it sit on it long.

Cleaning Recipes

Being the bunch of allergy prone snifflies that we are ;), I have to be careful about what cleaners I bring into the house. Even if I could bring those strong chemicals in, I wouldn't. My rule is that if it's full of fumes that make me have to open doors, turn on the exhaust and run fans to be able to breathe, it doesn't belong in my house or our lungs.

I have one universal cleaner that I stick with pretty much. I keep it handy in a spray bottle. In a clean spray bottle (with no other cleaner residue), put about 6-8 drops of dish soap. Any dish soap will do, I tend to use palmolive (the orange one) b/c it's antibacterial and thicker or I use the generic version of it because it's just cheaper. Then add rubbing alcohol about 1/5 of the way up. Next, add vinegar until the bottle is a 1/2 full and fill the remaining space with hot water. This cleaner is amazing. No need to buy cleaner to counters, one for stove, one for your tub, etc. This is universal.

It is also great for getting stains out of carpet. I have to say that the vinegar does have a bleaching quality and I use it on tan carpet, so i would be careful of using it on darker colored carpet. Use your own discretion here. I have actually been able to use this clearer to get an entire bottle of RED paint out of the tan carpet and you can't tell it was ever there! When I use it for carpets, I mix it together in a bowl and use hot water-as hot as you can stand it.

You can use this on toilets too. I buy vinegar in the gallon jugs. I actually get the box of 2- 1 gallon bottles from Sam's Club because we use it so often. Once I have have an empty vinegar jug, I will use it to mix an entire gallon jug worth of my handy cleaner in. I just don't add water to it. I add just the dish soap, alcohol and vinegar. I add the water when I fill up the spray bottles.