My favorite budget cleaning hack
Today I thought I’d share with you my favorite easy budget cleaning tip. This one will help you get your house clean and smelling fresh basically for free. Yes I said free because it’s using something that you otherwise would be tossing in the trash or compost.
I do probably 90% of my house cleaning with vinegar. I keep heavy duty cleaning products around for extra stubborn stuff, but I’ve cleaned with vinegar for decades and I’ve found that it works perfectly for almost everything.
But here’s my simple tip for how I kick that cleaning up up a notch and make it even better:
Orange peels. That’s it.
When I peel an orange for my kid, instead of tossing those orange peels in the trash, I put them in a quart size jar and top with basic household vinegar. After sitting for just a few days that vinegar becomes infused with that beautiful orange essence. Then I pour that lovely orange scented vinegar in my spray bottle and use it for all my household cleaning tasks.
We buy the big bottles of vinegar at Costco, and I always keep a stock of quart sized jars on hand (I like the wide mouth ones), and it seems like you can never have enough spray bottles. So this is really easy to do. No mixing or measuring, just fill a jar. I like to use a glass spray bottle for this because it basically just sits out on my kitchen counter all the time, so I like that a glass bottle looks a little nicer.
The orange essential oil combined with the vinegar make a surprisingly powerful cleaner. It’s great for degreasing, disinfecting, and all other kinds of just general purpose cleaning. I clean my kitchen with this, spray it on a cloth to dust furniture, spray it around the bathrooms for a quick clean up, and even use it on spills on the floor.
If you have kids or pets - vinegar is always my go to for getting rid of odors. Not to be too graphic, but my four kids are barfers, we have cleaned up a lot of vomit over the years. Vinegar is my go-to for getting rid of that awful smell, it neutralizes odor and disappears, so you aren’t left with any other artificial chemical smells just covering up odors. Now you add a little orange to that mix and you have a really pleasant natural scent left behind.
We also have cats and dogs that somehow seem to vomit a lot, and vinegar spray is my best trick for cleaning up those messes too. And it also works great on the occasional pet potty accident - the vinegar neutralizes that pet odor and the orange adds a new scent that the pets actually don’t love, so it discourages them from trying to use that spot again. For extra big spots I have been known to just pour the scented vinegar right on the carpet and skip the spraying. Let it sit for a bit and them soak up with towels and then air dry.
The only caveat I will leave you with is that the orange peels do leave a bit of color. So I wouldn’t be spraying this on white carpet or upholstery. But otherwise I think it works great on basically every household surface.
Want more simple cleaning tips? I’ve a post here all about my simple strategies for keeping my house clean.
