Homemade Cleaning Products

I've recently become rather obsessed with making homemade cleaning products for our home. I first became interested in attempting to make products for our home because Brett's Aunt Jade was recently blogging about her experiences with making household products.

The first few things I made were laundry soap and toothpaste and we love the results of using these two products so I started doing research into other household products that I might want to try to make. I've just made Liquid Dish Soap and an All-Purpose Cleaner that I couldn't wait to write about!

These products are the best I've ever used and they're made with the same few ingredients so making them was easy, eco friendly and cost efficient. I found the Liquid Dish Soap recipe here but here's the recipe:

1 1/2 cups boiling hot water
1/2 cup liquid castile soap
1 tbs white vinegar
1 tbs washing soda
1/8 tsp tea tree oil
1 tbs shredded bar soap

I just added all the ingredients to a large bowl and then poured the hot water over, stirring until the shredded bar soap was dissolved. I then let the mixture sit until it had cooled.

My castile soap is peppermint scented so the soap smells amazing and is incredibly powerful - it removed stains from one of our pans that I've been trying to remove for literally months. Brett even voiced concern that maybe we shouldn't use it because it was doing such a good job and therefore must contain something harmful. We were very surprised that homemade soap could be so effective.

I did a bit more research in to cleaners and then came up with my own recipe for an All-Purpose Cleaner because a lot of the recipes I found included Borax but I recently found out that Borax isn't as eco-friendly as we all thought.

So here's my recipe for homemade All-Purpose Cleaner:

4 cups HOT water
2 tsp liquid castile soap
5 tbs white vinegar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp washing soda
I also added a few drops of lavender oil because I love the smell and tea tree oil because it has anti-fungal properties among much else.

We were again surprised that this cleaner worked so well. I used it on the grout in our shower this morning and got amazing results and I don't worry about using it on C's highchair tray.

I'm so excited about making my own cleaning products that I've just ordered lye and many other ingredients to make my own old-school soap!

What cleaning products have you made at home?

Thought I'd add a cute photo of C. Her very first toothbrush!