Going Green in Comfort

( Merelize / FreeRangeStock.com ) I need to buy lemons, lot of lemons, for the thorough cleaning my home desperately needs. I've for a long time that people use lemons to clean, but I didn't realize how powerful they can be. According to an article on GreenAmerica.com, lemon juice can cut grease . I had no idea. The same site lists a bunch of other natural cleaners I already knew about — like vinegar, baking soda, club soda, hydrogen peroxide, and borax — but also a few that surprised me, including: Corn meal to soak up spills on a carpet. Olive oil as a furniture polish. Some essential oils may have antibacterial and antifungal properties. " Get Things Clean the Natural Way ," a post on the Better Homes & Gardens website, adds a few more natural cleaners: Salt as an abrasive cleaner.  Microfiber cloths to remove germs. Do you have more tips for green cleaning? Please share in the comments below.

(Image from Pixabay) "That's wasteful." I heard my mom say those two words when I was a kid more times than I could count. Now, I find myself saying it to my own daughter. My husband reminds her to turn off the light whenever she leaves a room, and she needs lots of reminders. I have been tackling how much water she uses at bath time. When she first started taking a bath by herself, my daughter was pretty good with the amount of water she used, but at some point, my husband and I noticed that we've been hearing her start and stop the water more than once. Who knows how long she had been doing that before we noticed? Judging by the size of our water bills, I'd say it was probably four months. So I asked her about it. It turns out she was running fresh water for three reasons: To rinse herself off. Apparently, she had been using so much soap that the water was too soapy to rinse herself. To rinse out the tub. Her dad is usually the first o...

I've been rinsing and saving food cans for more than a year. We FINALLY have accrued enough to make taking them in for recycling worth the drive to the recycling center. We buy only a can or two per shopping trip, so they've been really slow to add up. I'm also in the mood for doing a whole lot of house cleaning and getting rid of a lot of stuff we no longer use. Perhaps I'll be able to find more recyclable metal around the house while I'm at it, though I doubt it. I think most of what I'll be getting rid of will be clothing and toys my daughter has outgrown. We do have a bunch of modem/routers, which for some reason, back when we had DSL cable never seemed to work for more than six months or so straight, so this will be my chance to drop those off as well.