What You Should Know About Using Vinegar To Clean

White vinegar builds the core of my cleaning supplies. It’s cheap, environmentally friendly, and it’s effective.  Vinegar and water wash the hardwood floors, vinegar is my fabric softener in the laundry (gets rid of lint and pet hair),  as a  wrinkle release spray. Vinegar is the base ingredient of my window cleaner, and when mixed with baking soda, makes a great sink scrub/polisher that simultaneously works to clean out the drains. And how about those fixtures? Nothing polishes like vinegar.  And, I even use vinegar as a vegetable wash.

I also use vinegar to pour into that little place in the dishwasher where the “Jet Dry” goes. And Vinegar eliminates odors — and with a few drops of essential oils… you have a nontoxic air freshener.

But I’ve been missing out… and maybe you have too. We’ve been putting up with that awful vinegar smell (the worse it smells, the better, right?!)  For years, we’ve been throwing out and missing one of the biggest cleaning powerhouses there is: Citrus.

On Pinterest, I kept seeing all of these photos of dried orange peels. Most commercial cleaners contains orange oil — the stuff from orange peels that you must extract — as a powerful cleaning agent. So, I began some research.

After reading pages and pages of documents, I saved you some time — and I’m going to save you some money.  I discovered this: All you need to create your own citrus cleaner, is vinegar and citrus peels. That’s it.

• Save all your citrus peels!!! You can either add them a little bit as a time, as you eat the fruit, or make Lemon Shake Ups, and add them all at once.  (Need an excuse to eat more grapefruit? This is it… grapefruit smells great!)
• Rather than compost them, let them dry out… which doesn’t take very long — overnight.
• If you’re like me — skip the drying step. I plow through a bottle of vinegar so quickly, that the drying step isn’t important.
• Use a vinegar jug that is about 1/2 – 3/4 full.

• Start stuffing citrus peels inside…you can do it all at once, or keep adding as you accumulate them.
• Keep stuffing until the bottle is full.

• The vinegar helps to release the oils from the orange peels… and the oils permeate your vinegar…. creating a powerhouse. A natural cleaner, like you have never seen before! (Or smelled.)
• Place the cap on the vinegar bottle, and let it “steep” for about two weeks.
• (Is this vaguely familiar? Like creating your own vanilla extract? This gives me an idea… adding a vanilla bean?! Or Maybe lavender … roses… anything goes, I guess)
• Now, you’re bottle is ready to go. Strain out your peels, if you want, but if you’re like me, you can manage with the peels intact.
• Start your next bottle… this one can be steeping while you’re using the first one.
• Throw your leftover peels out into the compost pile — if you’re lucky enough to have one. My hair stylist throws citrus peels around his plants, as he says it helps his soil. I can imagine the vinegar infused citrus peels would do a great job of keeping insects away.
• This citrus vinegar not only smells awesome, but it’s so much more powerful than regular vinegar… just Google citrus cleaner for some insights.
• Start using this citrus vinegar as your laundry softener ( makes the washer and your clothes smell great). Make a paste with baking soda and scrub your porcelain, the chrome on your faucets, start washing your floors with it!!! It’s quite amazing… I’ll stop now… before I turn into an infomercial.