Frugal Cleaning "Recipes"

This week may be a little crazy for me so I'm going to spend some time getting posts ready today and have them set them up so that Blogger publishes them at a later date.

I know that cleaning, much less frugal cleaning is not the most exciting of subjects. If you have been following 50sgal's blog, then you've read some of her posts about her efforts to use as many frugal and "green"cleaning products as possible that were available in 1955. She's encouraging her readers to follow her lead on this, so this is a short post about what I'm doing at home right now.

Top left bottle contains my window cleaner. I substituted some liquid dishwashing liquid for the castile soap as I didn't have any liquid castile soap on hand. The shaker jar contains my baking soda blend that I use in the kitchen and bath for scouring and sprinkling on my carpet before vacuuming to make it smell nice.

The tub with the blue top on the left contains my homemade cleaning wipes. ( Yes, using paper towels for cleaning is not the best option in terms of frugality. I only use these for cleaning up really greasy or gross stuff, so a tub of these lasts me quite a while!) The tub with the blue top on the right is for homemade furniture polish wipes. 50sgal told us about a "recipe" in one of her old books that suggested mixing lemon oil and water 50/50, dipping cheesecloth into this mixture, wringing them out until just damp and storing these in an tightly lidded container. Use as you would the disposable wipes but, you wash and reuse the cheesecloth as it gets dirty. Edited to add: I wouldn't make up more of the furniture wipes than you can use in a couple of weeks. The cleaning wipes are alcohol based so they have a much longer shelf-life.

I decided instead of cheesecloth, I would use some white microfiber cloths instead since I can take the best of today and blend it with the best of days past! I just used one of these cloths today and haven't tried washing any yet. I bet that there may be some lemon oil residue left after washing so I've dedicated specific cloths just for this purpose. My regular microfiber cleaning cloths are blue so it will be easy to tell which cloths are which.

The top right bottle contains my all purpose and floor cleaning mixture.
The back of the bottle of pine oil cleaner had the recipe. My bottle said to mix 1/4 cup with a gallon of water for an all purpose and floor cleaning mixture, so I cut this down to 1/2 Tablespoon and 2 cups water to fit my bottle.

There's also some tips on the back about other uses for this product as well such as for greasy laundry items. I paid $1.00 for this 28 ounce bottle and if I only used it for my all purpose cleaner, it should last me quite a while!

Do you have a favorite frugal or "green" (or hopefully both!) "recipe" you'd like to share with me??