All illustrations by Andrea Kearney.
It is March and the daffodils are in full bloom. London is drunk on sunshine. There is talk of vest tops and the unbearably exciting prospect of leaving the house without a coat. March also means that the light has started illuminating my smudgy windows and the dust that had collected under my radiators over winter. Yes. It’s probably time to think about Spring cleaning. For someone who is slightly anal (ok, click very anal), information pills you’d think I would find the prospect of a spring clean satisfying and wholesome. This would be wrong. I do it as little as I can get away with and secretly long for a cleaner (my bookshelves though, are neurotically ordered according to colour).
My aversion to cleaning doesn’t mean that I don’t think about it. During my unemployment 18 months ago, a particularly low point came when I had exhausted Homes Under the Hammer and resorted to How Clean Is Your House. Kim and Aggy were all vinegar and lemon juice and elbow grease and baking soda and impossibly blonde chignons; and I was converted. As I sat on the sofa in my pyjamas, I thought to myself, if it’s good enough for Kim and Aggy, its good enough for me. It would take me another year and a half to act on this (ahem); fast forward to New Years Eve 2009. Maybe it was something to do with spending the last day of 2009 up to my elbows in ‘tetrasodium pyrophosphate’ (bleach, apparently) but that night I drunkenly resolved that 2010 would finally be the year that I would reduce the chemicals in my home.
A look in my cleaning cupboard, and in fact in most average cleaning cupboards, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were entering a nuclear zone. ‘Irritating to skin, toxic, risk of serious damage to eyes, harmful, keep locked up and out of the reach of children, if swallowed, seek medical attention immediately and show this container.” Yikes. I realised that there was something wrong with sloshing substances around my home that could literally burn my hands off.
The first hurdle in my new year’s resolution was not being able to find big enough quantities of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. My initial web searches yielded nothing, but just before I was about to spend £14 buying 6 tiny boxes of bicarb, I came across the wonderful Summer Naturals* web shop which stocks industrial quantities of everything you’d need to make your own cleaning supplies.
I began with surface spray. Mine had run out so I washed out the bottle and gathered my supplies around me. An air of anticipation settled in the kitchen. I’m not going to lie, it began dreadfully. Like an excited 9 year old I decided to slosh a bit of everything in there and make a ‘potion’. I must have been otherwise engaged during my school science lessons (vinegar + bicarb = volcano!) because attempt number one ended with a frothy white layer of goo covering my kitchen surfaces. Attempt number 2 was slightly more restrained but still an unmitigated fail. Putting any sort of powder in to a bottle with a nozzle will just clog it. I went back to the Summer Naturals website with my tail between my legs and found a much more functioning recipe for a surface cleaner (vinegar, water, Dr Bronmers castile soap and orange essential oil, if you were wondering) and the rest has sort of snowballed from there.
The Benefits:
• At the risk of sounding like a sad housewife, you can do most, if not all, household tasks with a few chemical free ingredients. This includes drains, toilets, floors, dishwasher powder and washing powder.
• I have saved a fortune. Domestos Grotbuster Bleach Gel will set you back £1.97! Cillit bang Degeaser Power Cleaner will cost you £3.07! Cif Power Cream Bathroom Spray; £3.66! My Summer Naturals stash cost about £20 and will last me years.
• It’s safe. If I spill a bit of my floor cleaner on my hands (borax, water, scented oil) the worst that will happen is that I will smell pleasantly of lavender.
• It works. I live in a ‘hard water’ area so I know that I need to add more vinegar than usual to help the lime scale breakdown, which it does
• My home smells amazing. Essential oils are needed to mask the vinegar smell, or your home will smell like a chip shop. French Lavender and juniper berry scented floors? Peppermint and rose scented surfaces? Oh yes please. The oils add an antiseptic quality too.
• Cleaning has become (dare I say it?) more enjoyable for both me and my mister, and it’s even slightly more regular too. Boom. Give it a go. And give it some time. It’s not quite as quick as squirting some Domestos Grotbuster Bleach Gel down your loo, but the process is much more satisfying and the results are pretty darn good too.
You can read more of my blogs here.
Categories ,Andrea Kearney, ,Bleach, ,cleaning, ,Domestos, ,Eco-cleaning, ,Eco-Design, ,ecology, ,Hannah Bullivant, ,Summer Naturals, ,Vinegar
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