Spring clean your mattress.

I saw this idea from Make it Do pinned a few days ago but had recently washed my sheets, so I meant to get back to it. Of course I forgot until last night when a diaper malfunctioned in the bed. Our daughter sleeps in our bed with us. She refuses to sleep anywhere else. Don't judge.

This morning I stripped the sheets and the mattress cover off to wash them, and looked up the pin and repinned it onto my "Cleaning" board. My strainer is still in the dishwasher from making refried beans yesterday (another blog post to come), so I just sprinkled the baking soda directly onto the mattress. I am also out of lavender essential oil, so I used tea tree oil instead.

After allowing the baking soda to do its job for a couple of hours, I vacuumed the mattress. I had help.

I have to say--I am impressed! It smells so much fresher in there. The tea tree oil scent is there, but it's not terribly strong. It just smells clean, and that is hard to accomplish when the entire family sleeps in that room. Give it a try! It works.

Homemade dishwasher detergent too? UPDATED

UPDATE (3/22): Well damn. We ran the dishwasher last night with this stuff and every glass is now encrusted in white--despite the vinegar rinse. I'm just going to add a cup of borax to this mixture I made and will grate my Fels-Naptha soap into it and use it for a laundry detergent. The search for a homemade dishwasher detergent continues. *sigh*

I didn't find it on Pinterest, but Food Inc posted a link to a story about making your own household cleaners. One of the tips is to mix two cups of borax with two cups of washing soda (more washing soda for hard water like I have in Lubbock) to make your own dishwasher detergent. I tried to pin the story, but Pinterest couldn't find a usable image. Damn!

Cascade packs are expensive. Even with coupons. I cringe when I have to buy them. Plus, who knows what's in them? Does it all rinse off your dishes that your family eats from? I don't know, so in light of all this, I was excited to read that I can make my own dishwasher detergent.

We have very hard water in West Texas, so I mixed two cups of borax with three cups of washing soda (remember--more washing soda for hard water) that I had leftover from making my own laundry detergent. I put the detergent in a clear plastic container identical to the one I used for the laundry detergent.

Pretty.

I am currently running my first load with the homemade detergent. I filled the pocket to its rim, and it seems to have washed out completely. Not bad, considering the gels and liquids never rinse out and leave a white, crusty residue.

The dishes appear to be clean and are in their final drying cycle. There's no funky fake fresh smell as you'd notice with a heavily scented commercial detergent. I guess that's good. I don't want to smell anything at all when I drink water...

So far, so good. I will update y'all after I have run a few more loads with the homemade detergent.

Update: The dishwasher finished, and I found some plastic in the top rack had a white powdery film. Boo! I filled the rinsing agent compartment with white vinegar and am running a rinse cycle only to see if that will remove the film. I'm keeping my fingers crossed because it would be really great if this works.

 

The vinegar as a rinsing aid worked! Excuse me while I do my happy dance! The vinegar removed the white film from the plastic and even my drinking glass was spotless and not hazy at all. So, if you try this homemade dishwasher detergent, the trick is to use white distilled vinegar in your rinsing agent compartment. 

Remember I'm terrible at taking photographs, so I apologize for the poor image quality. There was a big difference after using vinegar, even if my bad photos don't show it.

 That is as clean as Cascade Complete Action Pacs have ever gotten my dishes. I'm impressed.

Borax (20 Mule Team) and Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda can be found in the laundry aisle at Walmart. At my Walmart, the borax cost $3.38 and the washing soda was $3.24.

Homemade laundry detergent

On a whim Saturday, I asked my husband to pick up the ingredients for me to make our own laundry detergent. We do so much laundry and go through so much Tide that it eats up a significant portion of my weekly budget--even with coupons. I quickly browsed Pinterest for a recipe and of course, I forgot to pin it, but not before I made my own batch of detergent. Fortunately, I found the site and pinned it.

The recipe on DIY Natural uses Ivory soap, which is smaller than a bar of Fels-Naptha, which is the soap I asked my husband to grab. I just don't like the way Ivory smells. Someone figured that the difference in the size of a bar of Ivory and of Fels-Naptha should change the other ingredients to equal just shy of two cups of borax and just shy of two cups of Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda.

To make it easier, I'm just going with two cups of the borax and washing soda, and if I remember I will put just a little less in the second cup. So, here's what I did. I grated an entire bar of Fels-Naptha into a large glass batter bowl. I used my fancy Microplane cheese grater's smallest side. Then I added the (short) two cups of borax and the (short) washing soda. I stirred it up and put it in a pretty clear container with a latch.

The Fels-Naptha smells nice and clean. It almost reminds me of the scent of Dial, which shouldn't be surprising, considering the two soaps are made by the same company. It made my kitchen, where I worked, smell great. The garage also smells a bit better too.

I use one to two tablespoons per load in the drawer of my front loading HE machine. I had been worried that it wouldn't melt completely or that it would leave a whitish haze on my darks, but I had none of the problems *some* people have had. Most of the reviews of homemade laundry detergent have been overwhelmingly positive.

I like it! It doesn't suds up like Tide does, but it seems to work well. I even used it on my cloth diapers, and those are fussy little things. As a bonus, it costs just a fraction of what Tide costs!

The 20 Mule Team borax cost $3.38, Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda cost $3.24 and the Fels-Naptha soap cost $.97. The borax and washing soda contain much more than enough for one batch, but I will need to buy some more Fels-Naptha. I haven't done any cost figuring, but others have determined that this detergent costs about $.05/load whereas Tide costs $.21/load.

Removing stains from cookie sheets with inexpensive household items

When I took these cookie sheets from my father's house, they were in pristine condition. My mother had likely never used them. I knew he would never use them either, so with his permission, I took them home. My old cookie sheets were stained and gross. I was determined to take good care of these.

After a few months, my shiny and pretty cookie sheets started getting these weird oily, yellowish-brown stains that just kept getting worse. Plain old blue Dawn, which cures so many other ills, couldn't touch the stains at all. I was considering buying new ones when I found and re-pinned this post this morning. The original blog post is at "One Good Thing" by Jillee. I swear Jillee is a genius--check out her other cleaning tips.

So I had baking soda and peroxide on hand. Both are cheap, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I (liberally) sprinkled baking soda on the worst sheet. Then I squirted some hydrogen peroxide on it. I expected it to fizz, but it didn't. Then I scrubbed. I admit that it took a while to scrub, but I began seeing results immediately, so I continued to scrub. At first I used a dish scrubber I picked up at Target or Walmart or somewhere. Then I used a washcloth. Then I used a scouring pad.

See the results for yourself. These are the photos I took before, during and after the process, so they're in order.

I'd say it worked!

Vinegar removes cat urine odor

Aurora is a 13-year-old cat with a bad attitude and an even worse habit of urinating on anything soft left on the floor, or sometimes even on the rug. She isn't sick, the veterinarian said. She's just mad or the cat box isn't clean enough for her royal highness' taste. Having two small children, things get left out...a lot.

My husband says he always smells cat urine. He smells it more than I do because I rarely leave the house and am probably used to the odor. It really bothers him to the point he wants to have Aurora euthanized. I love the cat and don't want her put down, so I have been desperately searching for ways to fix the problem. I turned to Pinterest, and found that vinegar helps neutralize the odor of cat urine.

I set to work on the rug in my daughter's room, where Aurora had urinated at least once on the corner. I dumped the Febreze out of its spray bottle into a couple of glasses, poured vinegar into the bottle, and emptied the bottle on the rug. That was yesterday. Today it is a bit damp and smells like a pickle, but I can't detect the faintest hint of cat urine, and my husband can't either.

To wash the jacket and doll clothes she urinated on, I followed another pinner's recommendation to add apple cider vinegar to the wash and launder as usual. This worked like a charm. Nothing else has ever worked, and we have had this cat for a long time, so I've tried a lot. I'm impressed!

Read the original pinned post at Apartment Therapy.

The verdict: Vinegar for cat urine is a pinning win!