Keeping Clean

The last two weeks have been filled to the brim with life at home, I am most definitely not short of things to do.  In between cleaning the house, moving the laundry along its conveyor belt and sourcing, preparing and eating food, I am busy with enjoying the sunshine, my garden, daily walks, knitting and sewing.  I fall in to bed each evening exhausted and happy, my sleep is deep and restful.

Talking of cleaning the house I promised that I would come back here and share with you in greater detail some of the things that I use to do this after mentioning them recently.  A year of poor health, as a result of flu several years ago, meant that I had to stop using all the cleaning products we had in the house.  I became sensitive to limonene an ingredient in many of the eco-friendly products, although this was some time ago I have not gone back to buying these products as I love the alternatives more.  It was a bit of a harsh learning journey for me, but over time it has made me realise that I prefer what we use now, coupled with the fact that the children were very young when we made that transition so it is all they have ever known, they don't like the smell of bought cleaning products.

I thought I would start in the bathroom, I swear there are fairies living in mine who come in and leave their dirty foot prints the minute my back is turned.  I clean regularly it just never quite looks like I do, with four of us at home all the time at the moment I guess that is kind of inevitable.

The bath, shower and basin are all cleaned using bicarbonate of soda, bicarb for short and known as baking soda to some.  I wet a cloth and use the bicarb dry to rub into the surfaces to get them clean.  If you have tiles in your bathroom an old toothbrush and bicarb made into a paste is great for cleaning the grouting.  The loo is cleaned using a mix of bicarb for the outer surfaces and white vinegar for the bowl itself.  I usually line the bowl with the vinegar and leave it for a few minutes before scrubbing with a brush and flushing.

I also mentioned that we use loo cloths in my recent post.  They sit in a small basket by the loo.  When they have been used they go into a old nappy/diaper bucket that I kept hold of mostly because it has a lid and not many buckets do, the bucket is about half full of cold water which the cloths are soaking in until it is time to wash them. I usually wash ours once a week, we have about 60 - 70 cloths in use at any one time.  I pour the soaking water down the loo and rinse the cloths thoroughly in hot water in the basin before loading them into to two drawstring mesh bags.  I find that if I don't put them in bags they get worn out a lot quicker.  I wash them on a normal cotton wash and hang them out to dry - preferably outside - they are tedious to hang up as there so many of them. Inevitably they get worn and holey, at the end of their life they are put in the compost bin.  Once we are reduced to a quantity that doesn't get us through a week I will make some more.  This is about every six to eight months for us.

We inherited a carpet in our bathroom which we have yet to replace, one day.............. carpets in bath rooms with young children are not a good combination so I created a powder to sprinkle and leave over night before hoovering up, it worked really well.  It was a mix of bicarb, a very small amount of borax with a pinch each of  ground cloves and cinnamon.  My own version of shake and vac for those that remember such things.

The downstairs in our house is all hard floors which I wash about two or three times a month.  I use our homemade liquid soap for this job, the soap is a made using a bar of Oliva soap one of the few cleaning products we buy.  We grate it, add water and bring it gently to the boil to mix the grated soap.  My husband makes this so I am not sure of the quantities he uses, I am sure you could find these online if you look as that is what he did.  We make 5 litres at a time.  We have two dispensers, one upstairs and one in the kitchen, 5 litres of homemade soap lasts us about nine months.  I know someone who uses this for washing up too, we haven't found it quite right for that job so we buy washing up liquid the only other cleaning product we purchase.

We don't do much of our washing up by hand as we have a dishwasher, we make our own powder using equal parts of bicarb and borax.  We have a jar of this mixture in the kitchen as we also use it to do the laundry too, more of that in a moment.  Dishwashers also require rinse aid, we use white vinegar and softener which we are luckily enough not to need as our water is already soft.  I always think that is a rather odd way of describing water! Now, back to the laundry.  We use half a tablespoon of the powder I have already mentioned for each wash as a laundry powder.  As a fabric conditioner we use about a tablespoon of white vinegar with a few drops each of lavender and lemon myrtle essential oils.  I have noticed a significant reduction in the amount of moths in our house since using lavender oil in our laundry.

I think that is everything I use around the house, now to our bodies.  If we have a bath, which is less often these days, we use fine oatmeal which we hang in the foot of an old pair of tights and the water is strained through.  We sometimes add Epsom salts which are great for relieving aches and pains.

We wash our hair using rye flour.  I find I need to sieve this to get rid some of the bran which otherwise gets left on your head, not a look that you want to be sporting!  I make the flour into a paste with a little water which I then rub into my hair.  It has a surprisingly soapy feeling but obviously doesn't produce a lather like shampoo does, it also doesn't sting your eyes if it finds its way in.   I wash my hair every ten days or so, it doesn't need washing any more often.  One of the side effects, for me, of not using shop bought shampoo is that my hair has become much wavier and I often get ringlet curls in the ends.  I always wanted curly hair when I was a little girl, it seems I had to wait to get my wish!

I have also used bicarb and cider vinegar to wash my hair, it the first thing I tried when I couldn't buy any with ingredients I could use.  I tried many different methods but always used the bicarb first like you would shampoo, either dry onto your hair, a watery solution (1tbsp per pint of water) or mixed into a paste first, once you have rinsed that off mix a tablespoon of vinegar with a pint of water and use that as a conditioning rinse.  I stopped because I found this combination rather drying for my hair.

Toothpaste was one of the most difficult to find alternatives to, ten years ago there were few recipes on the internet.  Nowadays I use a tooth powder to brush my teeth with.  I have tried many different recipes over the years, one used crushed eggs shells which was pretty revolting, I didn't make any more of that!  I have also made a few using coconut oil which makes a paste but again I didn't particularly like them.  I have been making the same powder for many years now and am happy with it.  It takes some getting used to it you are used to using a bought paste, it is pretty dry at first, I wet the brush and then spoon a little paste onto the brush.

Tooth Powder Recipe:

4tbs bentonite clay/fullers earth
2tsp bicarb/baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
10 drops of peppermint oil
3/4 tsp activated charcoal (optional)

Please note that the peppermint oil needs to be food grade oil, not an essential oil which is different.  Put all the dry ingredients in a jar and mix them together then add the oil mixing as you add each drop to disperse it through the powder.  I have read that bentonite clay should not be stored in a metal container nor should you use a metal spoon to dispense it, I have also read that this is not true.  I keep mine in a glass container simply because it is easy to see how much is left and I use a metal spoon to dispense it and have for years so make of that what you will.

Still with me?  I am nearly there!  The last thing I am going mention is deodorant.  Unlike many of the other things I make this is one that I have not changed since finding a recipe all those years ago.  I don't use this a huge amount so this quantity can last me for months, in fact I cannot remember when I last made some.  I used to buy Toms of Maine deodorant back in the day and now reuse the old container to hold my homemade recipe, it has been in use for nearly ten years!

Deodorant Recipe:

1/4 cup bicarb
1/4 cup arrowroot
5 - 6 tbsp coconut oil

Melt the oil and mix in the powder, allow to cool a little before pouring into the container.  You could also mix in a few drops of your favourite essential oil if you wish.  Please note that as this contains coconut oil it will become runny in temperatures around 24°C/76°F so you will need to keep it somewhere cool, I put it in the fridge on the rare days the house gets up to this temperature.

So that is what I use and make here.  I hope you haven't read this and feel overwhelmed or that there is so much you should be doing.  It has taken me years to get to this point, a slow journey with a sudden change of direction due to illness about ten years ago.  Had I not been ill maybe some of these changes would not have happened, maybe they would but slowly over time, who knows?  What I do know is that I started some time in my teens, when I became aware of animal testing, I decided that I didn't want to put anything on my skin that had been tested in that way.  The only products I could find that met that requirement were sold in a health food shop, a world that I didn't know existed back then, it started me down a path I am still on today.

Thank you so much for reading this far, I do hope some of what you have read has been useful and/or interesting to you.  If there is anything that you do that I have not mentioned here, please do tell me in the comments I would love to hear about them!