The Naturally Clean Home by Karyn Siegel-MaierMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I received this book as a gift from my sister a holiday or two back. I started reading it from the front cover and was initially unimpressed. Several of her recipes call for combining baking soda (an excellent cleaner) and vinegar (another excellent cleaner). Just because they are good individually doesn't mean they are good together. Why? Because together they react to release carbon dioxide and leave water. That's what all the bubbly is about when building a volcano.
Recently, though, I've found some good recipes from this book. I was cleaning carpet spots and ran out of foam cleaner. Rather than put the project aside till the next Walmart run, I made my own foam carpet cleaner from her recipe. I like it. It works, its easy to make, and its cheap.
This week, I've borrowed a friend carpet steam cleaner and I've used the recipe for carpet steam cleaner to clean the carpets. I like it. (And the carpets look so nice after being cleaned!).
Overall, I think she's got some good recipes for cleaning, but the reader will need to pick and choose. I like her use of essential oils and she has a nice chart at the front for what the different herbs are reported to be used for. The recipes are simple with easily found ingredients. If you need a reference for cleaning recipes, this isn't a bad one to have.
View all my reviews
That's funny about the baking soda and vinegar. I've heard that both of those are good for your hair...but not together, obviously. Does she say anything about soap being bad for carpets? A friend of mine says that soap does clean them, but attracts dirt to them after.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't get the soap out, yeah, it will hang on to the dirt. That's what it does... it grabs the dirt and when you remove the soap, you remove the dirt. But any soap left....
ReplyDeleteher recipe for the steam cleaner includes a bit of liquid soap, which makes sense. You've just got to make sure to get the soap out!