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I used to have a different bottle of cleaner for everything in our house. We had a lot of bottles. I really began to dislike the chemically smells they gave off. Sometimes they would give me headaches. I did not like how much space they took up. I despised the childproof lock on my bathroom cabinet that I had to keep on because I read all the fine print warnings on the cleaning bottles. So one day I just threw them all in the trash, along with the childproof lock. We went to Costo and bought a large bag of baking soda and 5 litres of vinegar. Essential oils get rid of the vinegary smell. Cleaning has become much easier and no, I don't miss any of those commercial cleaners. It really is true that many times, less is more.
Here is a link with recipes to try.
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I read about people making their own laundry detergent. It seemed pretty simple and I like simple. My large Costo supply of laundry detergent just ran out so it was time to give it a try. We followed a recipe off of
here.
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We put our soap in the microwave just long enough to dry it out so it would crumble before putting it in the food processor.
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Our Zote soap after a run through the food processor. After that we just mixed it with Borax and Washing Soda. I did spend an extra 2 minutes running it through my food processor one last time because I wanted it to be super fine. Easy peasy.
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Of course Steve was interested in doing the math:
Total cost for 96 loads of detergent : $5.35
Cost per load : $0.06
(It would be fair to say the cost varies depending on how much you pay for your supplies.)
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We also picked some lavender and lemons out of our garden that we are going to soak for 6 weeks to use to make linen spray and scent our vinegar cleaning solution.