Healthy Home Guide

Create your own natural furniture polish

Five Natural Furniture Polishes

Wood furniture is beautiful, and it is important to give our most prized pieces some tender, loving care.  That means preventing spills on them and polishing regularly.  Most store-bought furniture polishes, however, are full of chemicals that can be unsafe and not environmentally friendly.  But there are natural ingredients that can be used to make safer and less expensive furniture polish.  Here are five recipes:

#1:  10 drops of lemon oil, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and a small amount of olive oil. This mixture is great for everyday dusting.  The key is to get the right kind of lemon oil.  Many brands contain petroleum distillates, which are not environmentally friendly.  You can find pure lemon oil at an herb store or online.

#2:  1/4 cup of vinegar and a few drops of jojoba (if you can’t find jojoba, olive oil is an acceptable substitute). The type of vinegar you should use depends on the type of wood you are polishing.  Apple cider vinegar is slightly more effective, but it could stain lighter woods.  If you are concerned about staining, use white vinegar instead.

#3:  2 1/2 ounces of olive oil, 1 1/2 ounces of coconut oil, 1 ounce of beeswax, 1 ounce of carnauba wax, and 4 ounces of distilled water. Put oils and waxes in a double boiler and melt them, then pour in the water and mix thoroughly.  Rub the mixture into your furniture and work in with a soft cloth.

#4:  Juice of one lemon, 1 teaspoon of olive oil, and 1 teaspoon of water. Put a thin coat on furniture, let sit for a few minutes, and buff with a soft cloth.

#5:  1/8 cup of linseed oil, 1/8 cup of vinegar, and 1/4 cup of lemon juice. Linseed oil has a pleasant fragrance and polishes well.  But it is important to get the food-grade kind, as the type found in hardware stores contains ingredients that may dry your furniture out.

When mixing your own cleaners, it’s important to consider the shelf life of the ingredients.  Most oils and lemon juice can turn rancid, but some will last longer than others.  Vinegar has an unlimited shelf life, and it is a preservative, so cleaners containing it will last much longer.

Making your own furniture polish allows you to be in control of its ingredients.  That means you don’t have to worry about having an allergic reaction or exposing yourself and your family to substances that may be harmful to your health.  It also means that you can be more considerate of the environment than using store-bought polishes will allow.  Natural furniture polish provides an inexpensive and effective way to care for your furniture and protect your family and the environment at the same time.
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Five Natural Glass Cleaners

It is shocking how many dangerous chemicals the average person has in their home. Everyday cleaning products often contain substances that can be harmful to the environment, pets and humans. Making our own cleaners allows us to control what is in them, but it can be tricky to figure out what ingredients can be safely used on what surfaces. Making your own glass cleaner is a good start. Here are five natural glass cleaners that you can mix up at home:

#1: Vinegar is a great window cleaner. You can either use it full strength, or mix it half-and-half with water. The scent takes some getting used to, and it will burn if you get it in your eyes, but vinegar is very safe and effective.

#2: 1/2 cup of lemon juice and 2 cups of water makes a pleasant-smelling glass cleaner. You could also add in a small amount of castile soap for greater effectiveness.

#3: Many naturalists use cornstarch in their natural glass cleaner mixtures. It is said to reduce streaking. 1 tablespoon of cornstarch can be mixed with a quart of warm water and 1/4 cup of white vinegar. For best results, clean windows with this mixture when it’s shady so that the sun doesn’t cause them to dry too quickly.

#4: Rubbing alcohol is good for cleaning windows, and it helps prevent frost in the wintertime as an added bonus. 1/2 cup of rubbing alcohol to 1 quart of water is enough to be effective. Be sure that the area is well ventilated when cleaning with rubbing alcohol, and keep the mixture out of the reach of children.

#5: If you have been using store-bought cleaners to clean your windows, a natural cleaner could cause streaks due to the residue left behind by those cleaners. To prevent this, wash windows with a mixture of 1/4 cup of castile soap, 1 cup of vinegar, and one gallon of water. After this initial cleaning, your natural cleaners should do a nice job of keeping the windows clean and streak free.

In addition to making your own natural cleaners, cleaning windows with old newspapers has several benefits. It is cheaper than using paper towels, it further protects from streaking, it doesn’t leave lint behind, and it reduces waste.

Making our own homemade natural glass cleaners is a great way to make our homes safer and help protect the environment from the harsh chemicals that can be found in commercial formulations. You probably have most or all of the ingredients you need in your home already, and if you don’t they can be purchased very inexpensively at a grocery or discount store. While it’s always a good idea to keep cleaners where children can’t reach them, most of these cleaners are non-toxic and virtually harmless.

How to Clean Your Kitchen the Natural Way

The kitchen is often one of the most complicated rooms in the house to clean. Most households have numerous cleaners just for the kitchen. These include floor cleaners, oven cleaners, dish detergent, and one or more surface cleaners. This is often not only expensive, it can also results in a lot of added chemicals in our homes.

Making our own natural cleaners can save money and avoid the hazards of cleaning the kitchen with harsh chemicals.

Here are some natural cleaners for your kitchen that you can make easily at home:

Oven

To keep the oven from getting so messy in the first place, try sprinkling a generous amount of salt on spills right after they happen, while the oven is still hot. Once cooled, you can usually scrape the spill up easily.

For regular cleanings, a mixture of equal parts baking soda and hot water is safe and effective. This will make a paste that you can apply and let sit for one minute before scrubbing and rinsing off.

*For tough stains, add an equal part of salt to the mix, apply and heat the oven to 500 degrees for one hour, then let it cool and rinse off.

Dishes

If you wash dishes by hand, adding baking soda to liquid soap makes a cleaner that can be more effective and less damaging to the environment than regular dish detergent. There are also organic dish detergents available in health food stores. In the dishwasher, washing soda and borax are a good home-made alternative to traditional dishwasher detergents.

For the rinse cycle in the dishwasher, adding vinegar will keep your dishes spot-free. It’s also good for keeping the dishwasher itself clean. The rinse compartment in many dishwashers will not hold vinegar very well, so you might want to add it at the beginning of the rinse cycle.

For pots and pans that are greasy or have food stuck on them, soak in a solution of baking soda and water. Coarse salt and lemon juice work wonders on copper pans.

Drains and Garbage Disposals

Clogged drains can often be cleared by pouring a cup of baking soda and a cup of table salt down the drain, followed by half a cup of white vinegar. Let that sit for ten minutes, then flush out with boiling water.

Baking soda and vinegar are also great for cleaning the disposal. Pour those ingredients down the disposal, let sit for ten minutes, then put a few ice cubes in the disposal and run it. Citrus peels or cut up citrus fruits that are going bad will freshen the disposal between cleanings.

Floors

Floors can often be cleaned with nothing more than a damp mop. If you need something more potent than water, white vinegar is effective and safe for almost any type of hard flooring. Dish detergent also does a good job.

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