greening up my clean-up

i'm in a slightly panicked mode at the moment. my aunt (my mom's older sister) is visiting from japan and i cannot have her over to visit until the house is spotless. my aunt is a traditional japanese housewife, which means my standards are waaaaaaaaaaaaay short of acceptable. even my own mother, who shakes her head in despair when she comes over to my house, was worried that my aunt would give her a hard time about the state of her house.

seriously, i was almost tempted to hire a maid service to get the house in order before my aunt's arrival. almost. but i was even too lazy to do that.

instead, this was the perfect opportunity to get started on a green, deep clean. i ordered green up your cleanup by jill schoff and went scampering around town gathering up the materials needed to make my new cleaning agents. this is a fantastic book and i highly recommend it, even if you haven't been thinking about greening up your cleaning routine; it'll make you rethink what you're doing to your house and your body, and then give you easy alternatives. i also had my aunt bring me a japanese book about cleaning with vinegar and baking soda. i'm really hoping that with these two books i can get rid of all the toxic chemicals that purport to clean my house, and rely on more natural methods.

i'll let you know how it goes ... i've only just begun to clean the bathroom ::

baking soda scrub :: i used this to clean the hard-water spots on the glass tub doors
2 tablespoons baking soda
liquid castile soap (i used dr. bronner's peppermint liquid soap i bought at tj's)

i put the baking soda in an old plastic reusable container, added a couple squirts of the soap, and mixed it until it became a foamy paste. i scrubbed it on the glass with a brush and left it for about 15 minutes, at which point the doors got a squirt of vinegar water before a rinse with the shower.

love this stuff. it smells good and it actually works. the hard-water spots on our glass doors are really bad but i managed to get most of it off. to do a comparison test i left the bottom half of the door untouched and there was quite a difference.