Getting healthy clean floors

I am by no means a neat freak.  You should see my bedroom, it's a disaster area. But I do like to keep the "common" areas of the house clean and presentable.  It makes me twitchy when the rest of the house gets too far out of sorts.  Especially, the floors.  ESPECIALLY since Gavin is mobile and shoves EVERYTHING into his mouth.  And by mobile I mean he rolls, literally rolls like a barrel all over the floors.  So if our floors are overdue for a cleaning, it shows, all over my baby boy. GROSS, *cue eye twitching*.
The bottom floor of our house is what I would consider "common area".  It's big, and 95% ceramic tile. So, out of necessity with a side of laziness, I vacuum the tile, and the area rugs that we have in the living room and playroom.  Recently we decided to get a new vacuum because I was getting increasingly annoyed with our old one, it wasn't picking up dog hair on the area rugs, who knows what it was missing on the tile.  The last straw was when B broke a wine glass on the tile and tried to use the vacuum to pick up the small pieces of glass, FAIL, it missed a ton. So we took the plunge and got a refurb Dyson.  

They are super pricey, I will fully admit that.  But that damn vacuum was one of the best investments we've made in a long time.  The HORROR I felt looking at the full canister after vacuuming my "clean" floors.  That thing sold me right away.  Not a sponsored post, more a PSA for people who need clean floors.  It picks up dog hair, and incredible amounts of dust/dirt.  Technically it's also an investment in our health, hmmm I wonder if we could HSA it? ;).  Zach has asthma, and the rest of us including him, have terrible allergies, so a vacuum that gets the yuck out is worth it on every level.

Ok so now that the suck-up-able dirt is gone from the floors I needed something better than the mop and bucket to do the welded on dirt.  I had been using the standard method with vinegar and some lavender oil, and I *thought* that was doing an ok job.  Until one day after some serious walker use from Mr. G thang, I noticed his little feet were BLACK.  Like he had been running around outside black.  I was so completely disgusted I turned to Amazon immediately for something better.  We have, in the past, had a Shark steam mop.  It seemed good at the time, however it was kind of clunky and it broke within an a year, so I knew I didn't want that.  There are some fancy pants expensive options out there, but all the reviews indicated they would go the way of the Shark too.  So, I decided on a cheap option, for under $50 I have a steam mop that is working quite nicely.  Similar to the Dyson experience, I was horrified, although this time not as surprised to see how black the mop pad was after I did 1/3 of my floor.  Now after a month usage or so, it only gets that black after doing the entire floor :/. What can I say, 2 little boys, a dog and a hubs, our floors get D-I-R-T-Y.  So benefits to the steam mop: you just use water, so no chemicals; nothing to buy again, just water; can use to sanitize sections of the floor; picks up dirt waaaaay better because it's so hot.  Completely worth $50, even if I have to spend it every year.

*All links are affiliate links, mostly so I could get a picture to use without any issues.

DIY hand soap

We use an obscene amount of hand soap in this house.  We're not crazy clean people, by any means, but we have a 3.5yo little BOY and a baby, so we are all constantly washing our hands.  My 3.5yo is finger painting, and snacking on sticky things, and going potty (all.by.himself.) And the baby is obviously dirtying his diapers and the changer of said diapers definitely wants/needs to wash their hands, often.  I'm obviously not interested in spending at least $3 every week to replenish our soap supply (helloooo the name of this blog should give you a clue I'm super cheap, ahem, frugal).  So, I took to pinterest to find out how to save money on hand soap, and it did not disappoint.

I know the first thing you're thinking, "just by the refills, that's cheap!".  Yah, it's not NEARLY this cheap, although I will fully admit, it's easier, so if you're supah lazy (like I tend to be on occasion) then this isn't for you.  It's just a question of how much you want to save, and how green you want to be.  I've said it before I'm just a shade of green, by no means the queen of green, for me, sometimes convenience wins.  But not this time :).  We made a GALLON of hand soap using this method, for essentially the cost of a bar of good bar of soap, so like $4-$5.  A GALLON people, it's lasted us a few months now so I will be doing this again.  Truth be told, the hubs made the first batch, but I observed and it wasn't hard at all.

Almost gone, this was full when we made it though!

re-use one of the bottles for hand soap you have

We used the pinterests and followed the method outlined in this post by The Farmer's Nest.  We actually used Mrs. Meyer's Lemon Verbana and it smells great, very clean.  Like she says in her post, save the jug from the distilled water and put your homemade soap in there for storage.  And make sure you keep the bottles from the hand soap you bought before you knew you could make it to refill with this MUCH cheaper version ;).

These are the supplies, you can get easily from Amazon, and this will give you MORE than enough to get started!  You can make like 6 batches with this stuff for under $40.

Truth?  She mentions this in her post, but it kinda does look/feel like snot, but it does the job, so really can we be so picky?  Keep in mind when you buy it pre-made from the store you are paying for WATER, I mean really, when she put it like that, I was fully motivated to try it out.  So I already mentioned, it's cheap, it's green because you are not buying all kinds of plastic bottle packaging and and soap that potentially has an assortment of chemicals in it.  You know exactly what is in this.  I say, try it out, what's the worst that could happen?  You don't like it, and go back to buying soap.  OR you could love it and love saving money ;).

Homemade All-purpose Cleaner

I have seen a ton of all-purpose DIY sprays all over Pinterest.  I tried a few, but none worked exactly the way I wanted.  We have granite counter tops, and for me, they need to shine if they are clean.  I found some sprays that left the counter top all streaky and wet looking, like your car windshield after a rain.  I found other sprays that left a white film over the counters that made it look like I wiped with a dirty rag.  Finally I got frustrated and decided to just improvise.  Well with a tiny bit of tweaking, voila! I have something that works.  It cleans fantastically and leaves my counter tops all shiny and beautiful.  It even got dried up bbq sauce up like nothing.  AND for me, I *hate* the pure vinegar smell and this one doesn't bother me a bit. So here's what I came up with:

Homemade All-purpose Countertop Spray (works on Granite!) :
3 cups hot water
1 cup distilled white vinegar
1/4 tsp liquid castile soap (I used Dr. Bronner's lavender)
10 drops lavender essential oil

Use a cleaned-out spray bottle from a cleaner that you use up, I like the white one because I can write the "recipe" on the bottle. Shake it up, and you're good to go!

This recipe is crazy cheap, here's the break-down:
1 cup of vinegar - I buy 1.32 gallons of vinegar from Costco for ~$3, so this works out to: $0.19
1/4 tsp castile soap - I bought 32oz from Amazon for $16, so this works out to:  $0.021
10 drops lavender oil - bought on Amazon for $9.99, so this works out to: $0.05

Grand Total:  $0.261

Compared to ~$3 for a spray you'd buy at Target, that's a 10 on the cheap scale.  And it's also very green and safe, no chemicals to worry about with your food or the kiddos.

I'm sharing this on frugal days, sustainable ways today!