I would in no way consider myself a “green” person. I do try and do my part to recycle my newspapers each week, but beyond that, not much.
Last weekend I decided to finally clean my dirty laminate wood floors. There were spots in just about every area and I could see them when the light hit them just right. Its one thing to have the dust and dog hair on the floor, I can vacuum that up. Its after I clean that up that I can still see the spots.
I wanted to clean the floor, but also make sure that I preserved their finish and coating. So I started looking up cheap and easy ways to clean them. I came across an article about the usual dishwashing liquid and water, some expensive pre-made cleaner that you can buy at the store and a few other suggestions. What really caught my eye was vinegar and water. I knew that people use this on their kitchen counters and bathrooms, but I never thought about it for my floors. I honestly wasn’t sure how it would make my house smell after covering such a large area of my house.
I mixed about 1/3 cup vinegar into a 1.5 quart or so spray bottle. I used a microfiber sponge and manually cleaned every inch of my floors. With absolutely no real effort, all the spots and more came up! I was really impressed with how easily it worked. The only thing that I would change next time is using a microfiber mop instead of doing it all by hand! I was expecting to have to really scrub, but since that was unnecessary, a mop would work just fine.
A lot of you may have already found that awesome green cleaning power of vinegar and water. I just wanted to share with you so that if you haven’t, you’d know that it DOES work. And a bottle of vinegar is like $.88 at Walmart if you don’t have any. Talk about cheap! That will last you a while too.
Do you use cheap and green products for cleaning? Do you have any other suggestions? Please share!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I use vinegar to take the smell out of the house by placing some in a bowl on the counter after cooking. I also use microfiber cloths to clean. The product says you don’t need to use anything else with the cloth to clean, but I still do. The mirror microfiber cloths are great – I don’t need to add anything but water and mirrors and windows come out so clean.
How funny is this? I entered the Captcha words wrong so it gave me a message saying I entered it incorrectly then provided me with another set of words…one of which was “dummy”. I’ll try not to take it personal! Haha.
Yeah I just added the captcha thing last night because I’ve been getting a whole lot of spam here lately. Hoping to cut down on that a bit.
But that is funny it said dummy! This captcha thing is actually quite neat. Everytime that you enter 2 of those words, you are helping to digitize a book in print.