Clean Your Whole House With 3 Things — Stop Buying 20 Products

My name is Darlene Hollis, and I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years. The inspector there never cared what your cleaner smelled like. He cared whether the surface was clean. You buy the right bottle for the right surface. Glass, granite, stainless, tub, toilet, counter, floor. I helped a neighbor pack her kitchen last spring and counted twenty-two bottles under one sink, most half full, just over a hundred and thirty dollars' worth. Dirt does not care what room it is in. Nearly everything in a house is one of three problems. Grease, mineral, or stuck-on grime. Miss Doris, who trained me, said it this way. Grease wants soap, scale wants sour, stuck-on wants scratch. Dish soap is a surfactant, one end grabbing grease and one end grabbing water. Vinegar is a mild acid, and that cloudy film on your faucet is mineral. Baking soda is a soft grit, softer than porcelain, so it scours without scratching. And clean is not a smell. Pine and lemon are perfume sprayed over the top of clean. A gallon of vinegar, a box of soda, a bottle of plain dish soap and two dollar-store sprayers came to right around ten dollars, and that cleans my house three months or more. Half vinegar and half water in one bottle for glass, chrome and shower doors. Warm water and one squirt of soap in the other for everything else. The specialty bottles run four to six dollars apiece, and a house keeping eight or ten going spends a couple hundred dollars a year against maybe forty. In this video I show you the three things to buy, what each one actually does, how to mix both bottles, how to set up a soda shaker, how to lift a scorched pan with a simmer, how to soak a crusted faucet instead of scrubbing it, how to keep a greasy drain moving, and the stove habit from that school kitchen I have never broken. I also tell you where it falls short. These three clean, but they do not disinfect a sickroom, and when a stomach bug came through that school we did not reach for vinegar. WHAT YOU WILL NEED Gallon of plain white distilled vinegar, five percent acidity, a little over $3 Big box of baking soda, about $1.50 Bottle of plain unscented dish soap, about $3 Two dollar-store spray bottles, about $1.25 apiece An old shaker jar with holes in the lid A damp rag kept folded by the stove A WORD OF CAUTION Keep the vinegar off marble, granite and any natural stone. The acid dulls the polish and you cannot shine it back with a rag, so stone gets the soapy-water bottle only. Never mix vinegar with bleach, or with anything that has bleach in it. That makes a gas that will run you out of the room, and I mean that seriously. Subscribe and I will keep putting up the plain, cheap ways a house was kept clean before anybody built an aisle for it. #cleaningtips #frugalliving #bakingsoda #vinegarcleaning #oldfashionedcleaning #homemaking #savemoney #housekeeping