I previously mentioned that I decided to start using natural products for cleaning. This was for around the house, personal hygiene, all types of cleaning. In today’s blog I am going to tell you how that went for me.
This blog is a part of my “Lifestyle Changes” series of blogs. If you want to read the other ones click here.
Why?
This is a very valid question. It is so easy to go to a store and grab whatever cleaning products that you need. There are entire aisles dedicated to them. They all work great and they are pretty affordable. They are also full of chemicals which may or may not be a health concern. I am not a doctor or chemist and I will not say that all chemicals are bad. In fact I will say that they aren’t. But some are, and if you are having any issues it is worth checking into what you are using. For me this was because of headaches, migraines really.
I have always got migraines once in a while for my entire life but they started to get a lot more frequent. I don’t know what changed but I was getting them almost daily. It was a bad situation. That is when I decided to change a couple of things. I can’t say for sure which one helped the most but I changed all of my cleaning products and I stopped eating food with a lot of preservatives (as much as possible). I think both things helped and I know that chemical scents for some reason tend to give me headaches still. Essential oils don’t for some reason so it must be something in the chemicals used to make the artificial scents. Full disclosure, not all artificial scents do either but most do. Generally the only ones that I can tolerate are lemon scents for some reason.
What did I do?
I went crazy. You can do it this way if you want but it might be easier to do a step by step approach. I, on the other hand, jumped right in and gave away all of my cleaning products and re-stocked my entire house with all-natural or mostly natural ones. This was expensive.
After I gave everything away to people that I knew still used them (I don’t want things going in a landfill for no reason) I went to my local grocery store to see what options they had. They had a few things but again most were very expensive compared to your well known chemical laden options. Also they were mainly almost hidden in the Organic section. If they were with the rest of the cleaning products maybe more people would buy them but that is a rant for another day. This is slowly changing too but not as much as it should in my opinion. I did end up grabbing some organic olive oil bar soap and some toilet bowl cleaner and went home to do some more internet research.
Next Step
After doing a little bit of research I found a local store that sold bulk, natural liquid hand soap, dish soap, laundry soap, shampoo, all purpose cleaner and bar soap. This was great. I grabbed as many empty plastic bottles as I could find and headed to the store. I bought some of everything. They worked great and were not only all natural and scent free but much cheaper than the offerings at the store. Also I could use old bottles so that saved some waste too.
This was all great but after a year or so the store wasn’t making enough money to sustain itself and started re-branding things. I can’t fault them for this at all. You have to do what you have to do to survive. They still sold and continue to sell all natural products. The bulk items went away though and things got pre-packaged with nice labels. Of course the price went up significantly. It seems to have worked though as they are still operating today but it is more of a high-end shop now. I just can’t stomach paying $6+ for one bar of soap so I started looking for other options.
What did I do?
When I decided to find other options I was lucky in a way since the big retailers started carrying more natural or mostly natural products since I went searching the first time. It had been a few years since I started this journey and a lot more people were trying to do the same thing. As usual though the prices were still pretty high and a lot of them still have some chemicals and scents added.
So I did more research. This is when I found out something that all of our parents/grandparents knew for years. You can clean almost anything with a mixture of white vinegar and water. So I went to Amazon, bought some spray bottles and got to making some vinegar and water mixes. I now use this for all purpose cleaning, windows, countertops, etc.
Around this same time my son was born and we were using Grovia cloth diapers. That combined with me needing to find an all-natural laundry soap that could handle cloth diapers made this a search that I had to complete quickly. Someone suggested Nellie’s Laundry Soda and we bought a small box and tried it. It worked great. You can read a review on it here.
So now it was just hand soap, bar soap, dish soap and shampoo that I needed to find. Dish soap is one thing that is pretty abundant and a good price at the grocery stores. I opted for Seventh Generation Unscented. It works great. For liquid hand soap I went with Dr. Bronner’s. It also works great and is very concentrated so it lasts a long time. The initial cost is high though. Bar soap, I found a company on the internet that sells it at a great price. I will do a review on that soon (if you want to be notified of that feel free to sign up to the newsletter). Shampoo wasn’t an issue for me (I have a shaved head) but my wife at the time found some in the organic section that she liked so we had what we needed.
What about now?
It has been over a decade now and as of today I am still using most of the same stuff. Dish soap I get from the store and it is usually Seventh Generation. Sometimes I get another brand but not too often. I am still using Nellie’s and I now buy a 5 gallon pail of it from Costco which makes it a great price and the amount that you get lasts years. Plus you get a nice pail with a lid at the end. I am still getting my bar soap from the company that I found online. I am still using vinegar and water for most other cleaning and I even found some all natural replacements for other things like dishwasher soap and rinse aid (you can use vinegar for this too).
My headaches are basically gone too which is what started all of this. If you are having any health issues or just want to try something that is a little bit more eco-friendly I suggest you start swapping out your cleaning products. There are more and more available each day in the stores and vinegar and water can replace most of them anyways. If you are someone who loves scented soaps there are a lot of options that use essential oils as well. It is a relatively easy change that is “probably” better for you and can even save you some money.