All Natural DIY Floor Cleaner

If you follow my pinterest boards, you know that along with being OBSESSED with DIY craft projects I am also OBSESSED with all natural cleaning and overall green living.  Now I'm not going to sit here and say that I am perfect...far from it (I've been known to down a few oreos here and there) but I do make a conscious effort to eat organically, and utilize green  habits in my daily life. All of my home cleaning products are all natural, and I do like purchasing "green" labels because I want to stimulate that branch of production and get more products out on the market. But, every now and then I have a hard time finding a commercial product that I really love. This was the case in my search for an all natural mull-purpose cleaner.  I do use the Green Works all purpose cleaner for cleaning my kitchen counter tops, wood dinning tables, my bathroom counters, mirrors, and tubs and it is AMAZING! My biggest difficulty was finding a green stainless steal cleaner as well as laminate floor cleaner and tile cleaner. All the natural stainless steal cleaners I found left a lot of smudging and streaking and I haven't been able to find a natural floor cleaner that could go from tile to laminate floors. SO, I decided..why not make my own!?!?! I did a lot of research and pinned a lot of ideas, until I settled on one final recipe which you can find here. However, this recipe called for regular Dawn dish soap and that's not really very natural, so I decided to substitute the Dawn with my Green Works Dish Soap so I could keep it 100% natural. So without further hesitation (I really need to learn to cut down my intros) here is the recipe of this amazing all purpose cleaner and all it can do!

Materials Needed:

• 1 cup Distilled White Vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup rubbing alcohol
• 2-3 drops Green Works dish soap

Basically I just combined all of the ingredients (I wasn't that careful with my dish soap measurement, just don't go crazy) into a spray bottle. I ended up using an empty bottle of the Green Works all purpose cleaner that I rinsed out because I love to recycle. The only issue I had was, since the formula isn't very thick it would slip down the tube while it rested so it took a couple squeezes each time to get the liquid out.

I had originally planned on using this formula as an all purpose cleaner, but I found that the alcohol smell was just too strong for small spaces such as the bathroom. So I decided to use this formula only for my floors since it did such a great job, and to develop another formula for an all purpose cleaner, which you can find here. The first thing I cleaned was the tile in my laundry room and bathroom. I forgot to take pictures when I was doing these, but the solution ate up those stuck on stains so easily! It really cut down on my scrubbing which was awesome! Then I moved onto my laminate floor. Now we are still in the process of putting this in, and by "we" I mean my amazing husband has been busting his butt after work and it's looking great and almost done. So I was really cautious and did a lot of research because I didn't want to mess up the floor. From everything I had read, and from my experience, this solution is safe for laminate floors. However, I would still do a small tester area (I did inside my pantry) that no one will see, just to make sure.  Also, you want to be sparing with your solution on the floor. You should NEVER soak your laminate or wood floors with any liquid.  Basically I put 2-3 spritzes and then mopped with a microfiber mop until I couldn't see any more liquid. So I tried to spread those 2-3 spritzes over as much surface area as possible to make sure I didn't get the laminate too wet. This seemed to work great and did an amazing job at cleaning all of the smudges.

 So here is the before and after of the wood floors. It's a little hard to tell because of the glare of the light, but all of the dust is off as well as all of the smudges from little kid hands and feet. It just gives a very nice sleek clean look to floors. I think the reason that this stuff works so well is because of the rubbing alcohol. While the other ingredients do the cleaning, the rubbing alcohol evaporates really quickly which makes it almost impossible to get streaks and smudges as you're wiping. Or in my case, when a preschooler runs across your freshly cleaned floors only seconds after you're done.

I've been researching some other really cool cleaning products to make at home so stay tuned for that! I hope you all found this helpful and informative, and I would love to hear if there are any different ingredients that you guys use for your DIY home cleaners!