I actually started using baking soda to clean my bathroom when I ran out of Scrubbing Bubbles. From that day forward, I decided I would rather burn calories by scrubbing by hand than burn my lungs and burn the dollars in my pockets. Generic baking soda is dirt cheap. Scrubbing Bubbles are not. Nuff sed.
Make Your Place has a recipe for a green soft scrub for your bathroom. Basically it calls for mixing together baking soda, liquid castile soap, tea tree oil, aspirin and some water. I don’t have aspirin, and I think it’s used as a sort of bleaching agent (since you can use it to get pit stains off shirts), so I omitted it.
My bathroom cleaning tools
The tools I use:
- Baking Soda
- Dr. Bronners Tea Tree Oil Castile Soap
- Bowl for mixing
- Sponge and/or scrub brush, depending on the severity of your mess
I don’t believe in measuring unless I’m baking. I simply pour a pile of baking soda into the bowl, add a few squirts of tea tree oil soap (tea tree oil is a natural disinfectant), get the sponge wet, and stir with the wet sponge (the water from the sponge helps make it pastier).
Pre-mixing.. So very exciting, indeed.
You can also forgo the bowl and sprinkle everything directly onto the sponge and start scrubbing away. But unless you’re only cleaning a small area (say, just the sink), you might as well make up a batch so you don’t need to keep sprinkling baking soda and soap on your sponge.
Okay, great. It’s not hard to make, it’s cheaper, it’s better for your health and the environment…. But does it work? You be the judge.
Before... Ew. Gross.
In my defense, I intentionally let this get really gross, for the express purpose of this blog post. Yeah, that’s right…..
After... Beeea-utiful!
It’s not perfect, which the camera thankfully doesn’t pick up. But the sink has seen many users long before us, and it just wasn’t taken care of. Neither was the bathtub. I would have used the bathtub as an example, but it’s so stained and so pitted that no amount of scrubbing would have made for very impressive pictures. It also works great on toilets, which I chose not to photograph closely because, really, who wants to see the scum inside someone else’s toilet? Didn’t think so.
And really, in fairness, it took almost no time at all to clean my bathroom. Maybe 15 minutes, tops, and that was with stopping to take multiple pictures. Even if you’re super busy, this is a very manageable method of cleaning. Plus, since there aren’t crazy fumes, you can make the kids do the cleaning instead. Those little fingers can probably get behind the sink faucet better too.
Secrets of a Wannabe Housewife 