House hold cleaners

I also make my own fabric softener or use straight white vinegar.

A gallon of water with a 1/4 cup of white vinegar. Bought a Rubbermaid Reveal mop (similar in style to a Swiffer) and a couple of the microfiber pads to go with it and use that to clean my floors. I will use one squirt and mop/buff a small section until it’s mostly dry, then move on to the next section. Been doing this for a year now on our engineered wood floors and it’s worked fabulously. We used to use Bona until we made the mistake of putting the high gloss finisher stuff (can’t remember the exact name) on it. That stuff will absolutely ruin your floors! Pages and pages of posts where people have ruined their floors with this crap! We had to buy an electric buffer machine with some mildly abrasive pads, buy a special floor cleaner sold at the store we bought the buffer from, and spent several weekends slowly removing that crap off the floors. The other option was to have the floors professionally stripped, sanded, and refinished. Thank goodness the cheaper option worked, but it took a lot of time going over and over the floors, slowly buffing that mess off. So, we decided from that point forward not to spend any more money for Bona products. I think our floors stay cleaner and shinier with the simple water and vinegar solution.

I began making my own laundry soap, made three different batches at 0% superfat (tallow, lard, coconut). Then settled on 50/50 lard/coconut at 0%. I found this to be the best combo to get my clothes cleaned.

Then did some research when I noticed my whites turning yellow. Turns out “white” is a dye colour. Without the blue from commercial soaps, your whites turn a dull colour after a while as that white dye fades away. And since most fibers are kind of straw colour dyed white, it makes sense that over time they are stripped. Or something along these lines- this info has been stored in my head in the stuff not important as been there tried that and failed. So I might not be 100% correct on this.

Then take a look at how your hands feel after you wash them with laundry soap. They feel a wee bit gooey and slimey. That is actually to help your clothes last longer (elastics). And to keep your machines innards in working order. When you use the cp soap with lower superfat, you strip your machines innards and eventually you will need a replacement quicker. And the one blogger site I read where they talked about this, it happened whilst their machine was still under warranty. But the company stated that only proper laundry soap was permissible. So the blogger had to fork it out.

I honestly don’t recommend anyone making their own laundry soap- a stain stick- yup. But the soap? Nope. The co “laundry” soap you want to make? GREAT for kitchen soap though!

Otherwise for cleaning, I just use 50/50 vinegar/water with some fragrance oils tossed in for things to smell nice! I clean everything with that. But I live by myself with no pets.