Organic House Cleaning

Our cats like to lick stuff. It happens a lot. We’ll be eating breakfast, and one of them will lick the countertop for no obvious reason. It’s odd, strange, and makes us nervous. What are they licking? What did we use to clean the counter-top? Does it have something that tastes delicious but is actually poison?

Sometimes we drop our toothbrushes in the sink. Sometimes a plate isn’t as convenient as putting a slice of bread right on the table. Sometimes we might eat a piece of popcorn that fell on the floor. Are we eating little bits of poison each time we do this? Meh…maybe…a teeny bit. If nothing else, it made us think, “what’s in our cleaning products? Are they safe? Could we take a big swig of our laundry detergent?”

We take extra steps to try and eat organic fruits and veggies, so shouldn’t we do the same for our cleaning products? We started by buying the book, Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck. The book is excellent, thick, and full of good advice. It convinced us that it was important to try and buy cleaning products that were less harmful to our guts than typical stuff.

This all happened about a year and a half ago. In the meantime, we’ve tried a bunch of different products. Some have sucked, others are good. In some cases, the organic alternative cleaner just wasn’t good enough to justify its use, so we’ve stuck with conventional cleaners. What follows is the breakdown of products we’ve liked, organized by the area it cleans.

Surfaces

There’s a ton of surface cleaners out there in the world. They’re typically broken down by the kind of surface they’re meant to clean. You don’t spray 409 on wood. We were big 409 fans until we started on the organic kick. We tried a couple of different things, and found that we liked the Method brand of cleaners from Target the most. They have different stuff for wood and counter-tops, as well as cleaners for sinks and granite. They’re gentle, effective, and smell nice. We’ve never felt the need to wear gloves. It’s sort of dangerous, but if you get some 409 on your hands, you know what we’re talking about. 409 sort of burns. Method wants to be licked. It’s like we’re cleaning our counters with ice-cream.

We also have a bottle of very diluted bleach water under the sink for cleaning cutting boards. You make it by adding a cap of bleach to a gallon of water. It kills bacteria that can collect on a cutting board. We use it before and after we use the cutting board.

Floors

Our place is mostly hardwood floors. We were really excited to find out that Murphy’s Oil Soap is considered to be an organic cleaner. It’s biodegradable, and smells great. Remember that Murphy’s Oil Soap commercial with the lady cleaning pews in a church? No? I do. I love the smell of Murphy’s. Your house ends up smelling like a really nice library. Great stuff.

Bathroom

We have natural stone floor and wall tile in the bathroom, we haven’t found any cleaners that we trust. Instead we bought a terrifying steam cleaner. It’s called a Scunci steamer. This thing is probably the coolest cleaning product we’ve yet found. You fill it with water, plug it in, and in a few minutes you have the ability to shoot a jet of high pressure steam out the nozzle. It comes with a variety of attachments that make it relatively easy to shoot screaming steam at your floors and bathtub. When you’re done, the mirrors are fogged up and bacteria has been boiled off counters and floors. If you’re bored, it’s fun to pretend the Scunci is a jet engine. Everything is cleaner when it’s exposed to the uncaring hellfire of a jet engine.

Pots, Pans, Plates

This is where we couldn’t really hang with organics anymore. We tried some organic dishwasher detergents, they all pretty much sucked. We had to scrub everything before we put it in the dishwasher. We’re sorry hippies, we couldn’t do it. We switched back to normal Cascade.

As for hand washing, we use Seventh Generation Dish Soap. It smells like lavender, and gets stuff clean. For our stainless steel stuff, we use Bon Ami scouring powder. You can’t use it on teflon coated pans, but for stainless steel it’s great.

Laundry

We went 100% with the Seventh Generation brand of detergents and fabric softeners. Instead of using drier sheets, we switched to these Laundry Balls (as seen on TV). They clump around in the drier, beating our clothes into softness.

That’s all we have for now. It took a little bit of work to evaluate what we really like when it comes to cleaning products, but it’s been worth it. Although we still think the cats licking the counter-tops is weird, at least we’re not worried it’s hurting their tender little kitty bodies.