My kitchen floor was filthy. It was filthy on a level on par with a fast food restaurant's. There was Spaghetti-Os and Cheerios creating a textured patina by the highchair. My husband had spilled milk and not cleaned it up (I only noticed it when I spilled some of my coffee and bent to wipe it up. It had been disguised by my white and black checkerboard flooring. In other words, it was gross.
I did what I always do when I have a question, I googled it. I vaguely remembered my grandma talking about how vinegar was the best thing for cleaning, so I typed in "cleaning with vinegar" and got more than three million results. Yup, that's a three with six zeros and three commas!
I decided to give it a whirl (remember - the floor was almost hazmat). I filled the sink with hot hot hot water, a bunch of vinegar (I eyeballed it), and a good squeeze of dish detergent and broke out my good ol' trusty mop. Here's the shocker - my floor got CLEANER than with my Pine Sol, with less scrubbing! Halleluja, I was a convert!
Once I found out how fantastic vinegar is for floors, I started to branch out. Here's a list of my top uses for vinegar:
- A laundry additive. It works like fabric softener. (And no, my clothes don't smell like salad dressing)
- Keeps cut flowers fresh (2T vinegar and 3T sugar per quart of water)
- Cleaning carpet (hot water and vinegar solution)
- Cleaning pet accidents
- Remove deposits from hard water in coffee pots, vases, fish tanks, etc
- Soothes bee stings
- Stops heartburn (I use apple cider vinegar for this one)
