Must or Bust : Spring Cleaning

Back before Utah decided to be, well, Utah. . . it was acting like spring for a couple weeks. Warm sunshine makes me do crazy things like deciding to deep clean the house. Thank goodness it decided to snow and break me of that black magic.

I turned to my trusty Pinterest for help this time, because truth be told, cleaning blinds has never been very high on my 'to-do' list. I wanted a fresh house with minimal effort and chemicals, and here are my findings. :)

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Cleaning Your Blinds, Window Tracks, and Mattress: Must

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I found this helpful little chart over at "Somewhat Simple" HERE. She links you to the corresponding site for each technique. I only used the blind cleaning, mattress cleaning, and window track cleaning approach.
Using a sock to clean your blinds is a wonderful idea. My advice is to not fill your bucket of vinegar-water too full because the water gets dirty REALLY fast and so you'll just have to dump it out and start over soon. Also, I kinda sorta cheated and sprayed a homemade cleaner {see bellow} on half of the blinds at a time instead of using the bowl of vinegar-water. I used warm water to rinse the sock out when it got too dirty to do any good {which was about every other blind slat for me}.

Another word of advice: wear gloves and just slide the sock over your glove.

Invest in some cute gloves before starting to clean the house. That way, when you're dead on the floor with a twitching eye because you bit off more than you can chew, you can stare at your cute gloves until you have the strength to stand up. They might be just the thing you need to keep going. :)

For the track cleaning, I just sprayed some of the same cleaner in there, waited, and wiped most of the gunk out with a paper towel. I repeated the spray and wait approach and then used a swab until it was clean enough.

The mattress cleaning went quite well. . . I think. It's kinda hard to tell with that because there isn't really a visible change. I used some of the lavender/tea tree oil mixture from THIS post in with the baking soda, and I could tell a difference when it came time to vacuum. I would really recommend using some yummy smelling essential oil if you have it.

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Homemade Cleaners: Must

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In all honesty, I only used the All Purpose Cleaner from "The Homestead Survival" found HERE, but that was because it was all I needed, not because it was all I trusted.

Just to let you know, she doesn't say anything about what container to mix this lovely stuff in. I figured a 2-cup liquid measuring cup would get the job done wonderfully. 

It didn't.

If you don't know this already, you will. . . but when you put vinegar and baking soda together, they don't get a long at first. They fizz like crazy. I thought I'd be fine because I already had the water and soap in there, but, NOPE. It still fizzes. A lot. 

So take it from me. Get a big container and mix your stuff, then transfer it into a spray bottle. By the way, I found a Windex-sized spray bottle at Wal-Mart on the cleaning aisle and this cleaner filled it all the way to the top.

I thought the cleaner worked GREAT! I noticed it worked best if I gave it about 30 seconds or so to soak on the really dried-on nastiness and grease. It worked on my wood cabinets, my stove top, my counter tops, my microwave, my blinds, and my window tracks. It really IS all-purpose!  

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Super Simple Homemade Air Freshener: Bust

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As much as I hate to say it, I wasn't entirely impressed with this little fella from "The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking" HERE.. And that makes me sad because I usually swear on everything Kelly says over there.

I just couldn't really smell the essential oil {I used 7 drops}.
I don't doubt that it's freshening the air. . . I just like to smell my air. :)

I went a little wild and decided to Mod-Podge on some happy scrapbook paper to my lid before punching a bazillion holes in the top. I would definitely recommend the scrapbook paper {I'm sure fabric would work, too}; but next time I would take the time to trace a simple pattern for the holes before punching them. I tried to free hand a circle and it ended up looking like a deformed pumpkin, so then I just went crazy punching holes trying to fix it. . . and it ended up just making it look worse.




And, NO, I didn't plan on having practically the exact same flowers as her. She is the reason I decided to try flowers in my bathroom {you can see that post HERE}, but I didn't plan on being a twiner.

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So, go on! Get some cute gloves (and a cute apron) and get crackin'! Oh, and don't underestimate the power of a great playlist on Spotify. It's almost as good as cute gloves. Aaaaand if you break down and plop your wee one(s) in front of a Tinker Bell movie so you can clean like a mad woman, you secret is safe with me.