3 DIY Cleaners I Use Every Day in My Home (My Favorite Cleaning Products)

Welcome to the Clean My Space channel. My name is Melissa Maker. I am an accidental cleaning expert, which means I hate cleaning, but I somehow became embroiled in the cleaning game for the past 15 years. And over that period of time, I have learned a lot about cleaning products. I know which ones you need to spend money on and which ones you can make on your own for pennies. So in this video, I want to share with you the three that I make for just pennies and I use all around the house. In fact, you can probably clean 80% of your house with these three things. Just a quick reminder, if you haven't done so already to subscribe to the Clean My Space channel. And I want to tell you that we have a whole DIY recipe book that's available in a PDF format. I've got a link for you down below. These are just three of the 50 that we talk about in there. A quick note on essential oils. I absolutely love using them in DIY cleaners because to me, cleaning sucks and smelling a lovely essential oil actually elevates the cleaning experience. Now, essential oils can have some beneficial cleaning properties as well, but I wouldn't put all of my eggs in that basket. I mean, you are going to need to use other things to get your cleaning accomplished, but adding essential oils will definitely elevate the experience in terms of making it smell better and you might get some additional beneficial properties from them too. But they're totally optional and you don't have to use them. First up, your all-purpose cleaner. Now, I use this on counters, cupboards. I use it for general purpose cleaning, dusting. Frankly, it's soap and water and it gets rid of most of the mess in my home. So if you want to fill your spray bottle with something that you can just pick up and use in a safe manner, I'm using pH neutral soap here, a little bit of essential oils and water. So let's whip this up. I've got a good spray bottle. In fact, I've had this spray bottle for almost as long as we've been making Clean My Space videos. That's almost 10 years or something like that. Now, to the spray bottle, I'm adding roughly two cups of water and when that's done, I am adding about a teaspoon of dish soap and a little tip here, you want to add your soap after you've added your water. Otherwise, your water is going to bubble up if you put the soap in first. Then, I'm going to drop in roughly five drops of essential oils. I'm using lavender here because who doesn't love the smell of lavender. I'm going to screw it on, shake it up and we probably make two bottles of this a week. You spray it onto your surface. You can let it sit for a minute or two and wipe it off. As I said, pH neutral is great because it's safe on most surfaces. You can also save money on your glass cleaner. For years and years and years, I have not purchased the famous blue glass cleaner in place of this recipe I'm going to show you right here, which is equal parts water and white vinegar. So I have this little teeny tiny spray bottle and by the way, this is like a mister style spray bottle and I'd be curious if you've ever tried it. You can let me know in the comments down below. So I'm adding equal parts vinegar and water and to this, I'm going to add a couple drops of peppermint essential oils. I'm going to put about five in there. Now, one of the things people will often say to me is, hey, won't essential oils leave streaks if you're using this on glass and mirrors? And my answer is no. There's actually not enough oil in essential oils, especially if you're using five drops to actually leave a streak. The thing that makes the biggest difference when it comes to streaks on mirrors and glass is the type of cloth that you're using, which is why I always recommend whenever you're cleaning a surface like that, high gloss finish or something like glass or mirror, you always want to use a flat weave microfiber cloth, something like this that can't cling on to any dirt and removes all lint and streaks. So what you'll do is you'll give this a good shake, you'll apply it and you'll just wipe using the S pattern and you'll see your glass and mirrors are cleaned to a beautiful shine and you don't have to spend money on blue cleaning products anymore. You might be surprised to hear that I don't actually think we need to mop our floors all that often. I think hard floors need to be swept or vacuumed regularly and spot clean, but every now and then, mopping them is important just to remove oil and dirt and other things that can build up over time. I think over mopping them can actually affect the finish and the quality of the floor. So if you are going to be cleaning slash mopping your floor, you might use this recipe in a bucket or a spray bottle depending on the type of mop that you use. I recommend using a microfiber pad mop. I've got a link to ours, our Maker's Clean mop, which is a cool taco shape mop in the description box down below. Now we've done a lot of research on this over the years and this is the one that we love for hardwood floors. So I've got two cups of water that I'm putting right here into this spray bottle and I'm going to just patiently wait for this to fill and there we are. Then I'm going to add a quarter cup of white vinegar. Too much white vinegar is not good for hardwood, but a splash like this is really going to help lift up dirt and oil, which is what we want. Then I'm going to put in about a half teaspoon of dish soap. I do not need a funnel for that. Soap is a surfactant, so again it's going to help lift anything to the surface, but too much soap leaves a sticky finish or film underfoot, which you don't want. And I'm just going to add a few drops of essential oils here. What you'll do is shake this up, apply it section by section to the floor that you're going to be cleaning and then going in a W pattern with your mop, working along the grain and working your way out of the room instead of into a corner. Now if you don't have hardwood floors, let's say you have tile or laminate or vinyl, I got you. We just did a video on different DIY floor cleaners and I've got that video for you linked down below. When you think about the cost of an average cleaning product that comes in a spray bottle, you're looking at anywhere from say $3 to $10 a bottle, not to mention the amount of plastic that those bottles waste once you're finished using them and you get rid of them. So that is one of the reasons why I love making DIY cleaners, of course, that it's a more environmentally friendly way to go, but also it saves you so much money. And that brings me to this week's common question, which is what's your take on DIY cleaners? Do you like them? Have you started using them? Or are you store-bought for life? Let me know in the comments down below. For me, I definitely still buy store-bought cleaners, but they are always my last option. I always try to figure out if I can make my own product first and get similar, better, or about equal results with a DIY version. If I can't, I'm not going to work too hard. I will just buy the store-bought product. If you want to learn more about taking care of your floors, here's a link to that video I was mentioning earlier. And if you want to support the Clean My Space channel, you can visit our store at Makers Clean, where we sell all of our microfiber products, and you can also subscribe to our channel. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.