Green Clean

Can I just say that baking soda & vinegar have become my all time favorite green cleaners? I've used baking soda mixed with water to clean the inside of my oven door, the top of my stove, my sink...I'm sure I could go on. It's incredible! A few of our appliances came with the house when we bought it. Since we're only the 2nd family to own the home, these things are circa 1974. I can deal with the Brady Bunch style, but some of that grimy stuff has been around for way to long. Baking soda is taking care of it all! It's my new go to kitchen cleaner.

What's brought on this rave about green cleaning, you ask? Well, today I tried a new cleaning mixture for some pretty horrendous spots on our carpets. Let's just say that darling Belle (our beautiful, yet stubborn, lemon beagle) has been using the guest room floor & a 3x4 patch of the basement floor as her new dumping grounds when she gets angry with us. Because I haven't taken the time to steam clean the carpets in a couple of weeks, there were quite a few spots. Let me preface this by saying, the spots had been cleaned up-we did not just leave messes around to soak into the carpet! But the spots were still visible to the naked eye.

Today I had an urge to get rid of those spots once and for all. So I mixed 4 oz of vinegar with 6 oz of water in a spray bottle, sprayed them down like nobody's business, covered them with a clean dry cloth and proceeded to steam them on full blast with our iron. I wasn't really expecting amazing results, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well this pulled the stains up. Even B noticed a difference!

As a comparison, I simply steam cleaned the patch of carpet in the basement that Belle has claimed as her own. Let me just say, there was a major difference! While the steam cleaner did clean some of the carpet, there were still noticeable spots downstairs. However, after lugging it to the guest room, I banished what little spots remained with my Bissell steam cleaner. I fully intend to use my new magic solution in the basement as soon as the carpet dries.

If you have major stains, it turns out a combination of heavy duty steam cleaning (iron style, combined with the vinegar/water solution) before a final touch up with the actual steam cleaner works miracles!

Give it a shot-you will notice a major difference! And if you happen to have a small steam cleaner, follow up a few hours later using the machine. A combination of the two really does take care of the worst stains. Good luck! :)