These Cleaning Products Should Be Bought, Not Made

When it comes to finding crafting projects, life hacks and inspiration, Pinterest is a veritable gold mine. Pinterest has more than 250 million users, which equates to a lot of people sharing their best-kept secrets about how to make life simpler, more fun and more creative.

But there’s one Pinterest trend that might actually bring you more grief than satisfaction: DIY cleaning products. There are too many tutorials and infographics floating around online, originating from sites like Pinterest, that supposedly teach you how to make safe cleaning products. We’re here to provide a little context for this fad and warn against making and using these products. You could be putting your Walla Walla County, WA home at risk!

Here are a few popular DIY cleaning product hacks that might sound good on the surface, but will leave you wishing you’d just gone to the store in the first place:

• Furniture polish: Using cooking oils and vinegar like most hacks suggest is a bad idea. They’re liable to attract more dust and can leave behind sticky residues if improperly proportioned. Store-bought cleaners are safe for your furniture and formulated properly.
• All-purpose cleaners: Contrary to popular belief, vinegar, baking soda and essential oils aren’t the panaceas they’re made out to be. While they might leave behind a fresh scent, they take a long time to disinfect, which means you have to let them set for hours at a time. This isn’t practical. What is practical is using a store-bought cleaner with eco-safe ingredients.
• Disinfectant wipes: Here again, vinegar and essential oils aren’t an alternative to disinfectant wipes. Contact time matters, and these ingredients by themselves won’t achieve a safe level of disinfection. Better to use brand-name wipes that are formulated to clean 99 percent of germs on contact.
• Window cleaner: DIY window cleaners are notorious for causing unseen damage to glass. For starters, abrasive cleaners can scratch glass at a microscopic level, weakening it over time. Additionally, most general DIY cleaners aren’t streak free, which can be maddening when the sun shines through and illuminates all those streaks!
• Odor-fighting sprays: DIY odor fighting sprays are, in a nutshell, ineffective. They mask odors instead of fighting them, which means whatever’s causing the smell stays there long after the nicer scent wears off. Commercial cleaning products actually trap odor-causing bacteria and eliminate them, for true freshness.
• Shower cleaner: You might feel good whipping up a natural shower cleaner using eggshells, baking soda and citrus, but it’s not going to feel so great when you spend hours scrubbing your tile and grout! Stick to fast-acting, powerful cleaners that actually soften and lift soap scum and hard water marks.

While it’s good to have a mind for eco-friendly cleaning materials, know that it’s becoming easier to find these items in stores in Walla Walla County, WA. You don’t have to go through the trouble of making your own cleaners and, frankly, you shouldn’t anyway. They’re just not as effective and have the potential to do more harm than good in your home.

Categorised in: Cleaning Services