First Time Cleaner Confession

I mopped the floor today for the very first time!!

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No, it's not as bad as you think.  I used a natural cleaner on my floor for the first time today rather than dragging out the pine cleaner I would normally use.  So far, so good.  The kids are all commenting on how good the house smells and how the smell is making them hungry (? white vinegar makes my kids hungry?) and I am very pleased with my clean floor.

See, what happened is this.  My Curly Girl used the honey to make a sandwich last night which is all good and fine in itself except she used the giant honkin' size honey rather than little squeezy honey bear.  And she didn't put the lid on all the way.  And then she shoved it in the back of the cupboard where it promptly fell over and spilled.  Everywhere.

I made her clean it but she's a flighty individual and didn't do the best job.  She rushed through it as she did through the sandwich making process (hence no lid on the honey) and the way she does through her school work (hence all the repeat work she ends up doing) and the way she generally does through life.

This morning there was still all the contents of the cupboard (bread, tortillas, peanut butter jar, my tea bags box, a big bag of almonds for homemade almond milk, a jar of marshmallows for krispie treats) slightly sticky icky.  My arms are still slightly sticky from cleaning it up this morning AFTER the kid cleaned it up twice last night.

And the floor.  Oh. My. Gosh! the floor.  I could not walk in there without loosing my mind.  And my shoes.  They wouldn't pick up when I stepped somewhere else.  Yeah, ick.

I had read an article several weeks ago about using natural cleaners in the house instead of all the chemicals we would normally use and I've been wending my way that direction slowly.  I figured I would use up what I had of the chemicals and then move on.

This morning, I didn't want to run downstairs and find the pine cleaner (I do love that smell) but I knew where not one but 2 bottles of white vinegar was so that's what I grabbed.

I already use vinegar for cleaning hard water out of the coffee pot and I add about 1/2 cup to my rinse cycle in the washer to remove irritants, but the floors?  Hmmm.

To my surprise, it worked great!  The smell is dissipating now that the floor is drying and the smell, as I mentioned before, is bringing nothing but good comments from the kids.  I may have to adjust the very unscientific amount I used for the mix, though, to pamper my pregnant nose a little more.  But the results on the floors?  Amazing!!

A bottle of my favorite pine cleaner costs about $4.  A bottle of white vinegar, easily twice the size of the cleaner at least, costs about $2.  Bonus!!  I love me some money savin'.  I'm not only being green, but saving green.

You can search the internets and easily come up with hundreds of easy home "recipes" for natural cleaners.  Got a great one?  Share it with me.