Healthy Habits | Week 35

Week 35 of our #healthyhabits2017 was to Make Your Own Cleaning Products.
An average person has about 40 - 60 cleaning products in their home most of them are chemically produced and often have quite obvious warning signs on the back. I thought there simply must be another way.

The transition for me was slow... first I started getting products that are eco friendly etc, but the truth is often I was not really happy with them. So when I stumbled upon a book that tells you, you only really need five ingredients to replace a whole drugstore. I thought - ok let's see if this works : (for all German reader this is the book and it's great) Fünf Hausmittel ersetzen eine Drogerie

The five key ingredients are

Sodium Bicarbonate (powder)
This stuff has endless uses (crazier then coconut oil) it's a natural occurring salt from Africa or North America. But nowadays most of it gets made from common Salt. It's cheap and as said the uses are endless from baking to medical uses, cosmetics, even as a fire extinguisher.

Soda (powder)
also a white powder and not to be confused with Sodium Bicarbonate is the second key ingredient. The high alkalinity of washing soda allows it to act as a solvent in removing a wide range of stains.

Vinegar
Most used one is the apple cider vinegar, because of its acidity and antibacterial effects it can replace a lot of cosmetics and cleaning products.

Citric Acid (white powder)
Industriell produced product often used to de-scale and as a food and cosmetics preservative.

Curd Soap
My favourite, I always have a bar at home and you can used it for numerous things. Shower gel, against nail-bed infections, even to brush your teeth (although I have not tried that yet) also I put it in lots of my cleaning products.

+ essential oils... you can use pretty much anything for the smell but tee tree oil, lavender, lemon, etc have more helpful properties than just a good scent.

Three of them are white powder and easily confused, it's important to label them correctly. Also soda should be handled with care. All of them are easy to get pretty cheaply especially if you buy them in bulk. In Germany you can get them in a drugstores, pharmacies or online. Now it's simple a matter of combining them depending on what you want to clean. I always thought it's going to be really hard and labour intensive and that you need a ton of ingredients to get started but in actual fact it's pretty easy and you really only need those five for a lot of things.

For example All Purpose Cleaner
50g Sodium Bicarbonate
50g grated Curd Soap (need to be heated up a little in order to dissolve)

a couple of drops Essential oil

700 ml warm Water simply fill it all in a old spray bottle.

Washing Powder

100g Curd soap

150g Soda

150g Sodium Bicarbonate
10-20 drops of an Essential oil

for white clothing add 100-150g Citric Acid

It's as simple as that!!!

HOW DID IT GO?

I am slowly trying to change more of the shop bought cleaning products into the new self-made ones. What I find really great is that I often had a bad feeling giving my girls standard cleaning products when they really wanted to help. So with the homemade stuff I am sure it's ok for them to use. I was surprised how much small kids love cleaning and we want to keep it that way, right :)

If you want to get more information on making your own cleaning products we have referenced to this homesong blog post before which is great and it has slighly different recipes and ingredients.