Anyhoo! As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been really inspired by my good friend over at Poor Man's Wife. She has blogged a few times about how much she loves cleaning with vinegar, and she recently posted her recipe for a citrus vinegar cleaning solution. (Is it a recipe if there are only two ingredients?) I love the idea of adding citrus to the vinegar...not only does it add a little extra cleaning power, it helps mask the scent of vinegar.
I HATE THE SMELL OF VINEGAR. I mean, truly loathe with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.
------Background story time! When I was 12 or so there was a lice (EWWWW) outbreak and my little sister and I ended up with it. So gross. My mom's solution to this was to wash our hair with lye, and then rinse it with vinegar. I wasn't crazy about vinegar to begin with, just never liked it much. So then it got dumped all over my lousy head and there were definitely some negative connotations associated with it. Later that summer, we came up here to Canada to visit my dad. Unbeknownst to me, his girlfriend (later to become my amazing step-mum) kept vinegar in a water bottle in the fridge for making salads with. You can see where this is going. Crept downstairs in the middle of the night, dying of thirst, and saw a water bottle in the fridge. Gulped down about half of the bottle before my brain registered what I was drinking, and spent the next 20 minutes gagging in the sink and rinsing my mouth out. Vinegar is no longer kept in water bottles, by the way. So - two traumatizing vinegar stories from my youth, and you can probably see why I hate it so much. End background story.-------
I know that vinegar is an excellent cleaner. I've used it myself and had excellent results, but I just can't stomach that smell. However, I really want to switch to natural cleaners...so that means I either need to learn to deal with the scent, or mask it. Enter the citrus!
Poor Man's Wife says to soak your orange peels in vinegar overnight, and voila! Orange cleaning solution. I'm definitely willing to give it a try, but I'm a bit skeptical about how much vinegar smell can be covered up just overnight. So here's what I've done...
I've been saving my orange peels for a few days now (sticking them in a baggie in the freezer until I had enough for a batch). Turns out I actually had enough for two batches...but unfortunately didn't have two glass jars on hand. So, I used a clean, empty spice container. The lid isn't air tight so that's the batch I'm going to use first. I'm going to give it a whiff tomorrow and see how much of the vinegar scent has been masked, and then strain a bit out to see if I can stomach cleaning with it. I'm guessing my hatred of vinegar might be more than the average person, therefore 1 night probably isn't going to cut it. If it needs more time, I'll give it another go in about a week. The glass jar is going to sit for a month. I read another blog where the woman gave it a month and said that she couldn't smell the vinegar at all. I'm still skeptical, but again, willing to try.
Fingers crossed! I'll update tomorrow with the results of 1 night's soaking!
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