Alternate title: The best use for vodka outside of a Screwdriver.
Yes folks, you heard me correctly. Vodka. I clean my house with it.
Well, not just vodka. But it really isn’t much more complicated than that. To make my all-purpose streak-free cleaner all you need is:
- 1 part water
- 1 part distilled white vinegar
- 1 part cheap vodka
Vinegar is a fantastic cleaning, disinfecting, and whitening agent that is safe for your skin, your lungs, and almost all surfaces (don’t ever use vinegar on marble.)
The vodka also disinfects, leaves no smell, and causes the solution to evaporate off of surfaces faster than water, and fast evaporation is the key to leaving your glass and mirrors completely streak-free!
I buy my vinegar and vodka in large bulk sizes to lower the cost per unit. It comes out to mere cents for a whole squirt bottle full of solution that would cost over $3 in stores!
I use this stuff everywhere. It mostly stays in my kitchen to clean countertops, but it cleans windows, all bathroom surfaces, I even mop the floor with it! And if for some reason you need an even stronger solution for really tough stuff, just add more vinegar, that’s really all there is to it.
Just remember, never use a vinegar-based cleaner directly before or after using a bleach-based cleaner. Those two hate each other! They combine to make a noxious fume that can really harm you, so just don’t use bleach!
Let’s try it on my streaky toothpaste-bespeckled bathroom mirror…
Before:
Cleaner working it’s magic:
And after:
The faint dots you see remaining are actually damage to the back of the mirror, not dirt. So clean you can see our old 1940’s bathroom perfectly!
I don’t make all my own household products…yet. But one by one I am learning how to replace all those expensive, headache-inducing, chemical nightmares with their kinder, gentler counterparts.
Do you have any recipes for homemade cleaning products?
