43 ways to clean with vinegar

You can clean almost everything with vinegar. If you can't clean it with vinegar by itself, you can probably clean it with vinegar and salt or vinegar and baking soda or vinegar and dish soap.

My house has very few cleaning products in it. I buy laundry detergent and dish soap (I plan on trying to make my own, I just haven't found time yet) but I use plain white vinegar for most other things. It's cheap, it often works better than other cleaning products, it disinfects, it's eco friendly and I don't have to worry about my son getting into it. Some people are worried about the smell, but it dissipates quickly and you can always add a few drops of essential oil or some lemon juice.

Here are some things I've done with vinegar:

1. Cleaning dried-on food off of hardwood floors and wooden furniture... no matter how long it's been there. Just lay a towel over the area of floor or over the piece of furniture and pour hot vinegar (I just heat it in the microwave for a couple minutes) over the towel. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes, and then use the towel to clean up the mess. Most of it should come off really easily.
2. When something spills on the carpet, soak up as much of it as you can with a towel or paper towels and then spray with half water, half vinegar (you can buy spray bottles at the dollar store and have them filled and ready to go). Let it stand for a few minutes and then soak it up with a towel, repeat if necessary. If the stain isn't going away, try adding a bit of dish soap to the vinegar/water mixture.
3. Unclog your drain with equal parts baking soda and vinegar. Pour down the baking soda first, then pour in the vinegar. When it stops fizzing, rinse with warm water. Repeat if needed.
4. To clean your microwave, heat a bowl of vinegar for a couple minutes - the gunk will wipe off easily.
5. A mixture of vinegar and salt will remove tea and coffee stains from mugs.
6. Remove stickers from most surfaces. Use a cloth to wet the sticker with vinegar, wait 5-10 minutes and wipe it off (the sticker will not be re-usable).
7. Clean toilets with a spray bottle of vinegar and a toilet brush.
8. Use hot water and vinegar to mop the floor - about 1 cup vinegar per gallon of water.
9. Place a bowl of vinegar in a room to remove odors.
10. Use a spray bottle of vinegar as an all-purpose surface cleaner.
11. Soak shower heads in vinegar overnight to unclog them. You can do this without removing them, too, just fill a baggy with vinegar, cover the shower head with it and hold it on with a couple elastics.
12. Use a spray bottle of half vinegar and half water to clean windows.
13. Use a sponge or cloth soaked in vinegar to remove grease on pretty much anything.
14. Fill the reservoir of a coffee maker with vinegar and run it (without the coffee grinds) to clean the inside of the machine. Run it a few times with water after this so your next coffee doesn't taste like vinegar.
15. Use full-strength vinegar to clean and disinfect wooden cutting boards.
16. Add a cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle of baby clothes to get rid of any urine stains or smells.
17. If you ever die fabrics (or your kids bring tie-dye t-shirts home from camp), add a cup of water to the rinse cycle the first time you wash them. It will help stop the dye from coming out. So will putting them in the dryer, even if you normally hang-dry your clothes.
18. Rinse empty jars that you want to reuse (peanutbutter, jam, mayonnaise, ect) with vinegar after cleaning them to deodorize them.
19. Clean plastic with diluted vinegar - this also stops static-cling, which will make it attract less dust.
20. Use to disinfect baby toys.
21. Remove deodorant stains (and almost any other stain) from cotton with a sponge and vinegar.
22. Remove stuck-on food from a pan by covering it in hot water and adding a few tablespoons of vinegar.
23. If your dishwasher has a space for a drying agent (like Jet-Dry), vinegar is a cheap alternative.
24. Soak glasses and vases in vinegar to remove the cloudy white build-up from hard water.

And some other things I've read about but haven't actually done yet (let me know if they worked for you!):

1. Put a cup of vinegar in the bottom of your dishwasher and run it (empty) once a month to get rid of odors.
2. Spray vinegar on furniture, windowsills, counters, anywhere you don't want your pets going. Note: may stain some fabrics.
3. To clean your sink's garbage disposal, freeze vinegar in an ice cube tray. Put a few ice cubes down the disposal with it running, flush with cold water.
4. Soak paintbrushes in hot vinegar to remove dried-on paint. Clean with hot soapy water afterwards.
5. Wipe car windows with water and vinegar (3 parts vinegar, 1 part water) to stop them from frosting over the next morning.
6. Clean salt stains off of leather shoes with half water, half vinegar.
7. Wipe CDs/DVDs with vinegar too clean them - this will not work on badly damaged disks, but will get rid of dirt and help with minor scratches.
8. Add 2 cups of vinegar to the rinse cycle of blankets and towels (cotton and wool only) to make them soft again.
9. Soak rusted tools in vinegar overnight to remove rust.
10. Clean your washing machine by running a wash cycle (without the clothes) with a cup of vinegar.
11. Dissolve a teaspoon of salt in a cup of vinegar for cleaning metallic surfaces.
12. Clean eye glasses with a soft cloth moistened with vinegar.
13. Remove rings that glasses leave on wood surfaces with one part vinegar and one part olive oil. Rub with the grain.
14. Clean grout with vinegar and an old toothbrush.
15. Add a tablespoon or two of vinegar to the dishwater to cut grease.
16. Get rid of oven grease - you can pour vinegar directly on the door of your oven, let it sit a few minutes and then wipe it off. You can also use it to clean the rest of your oven, and it will discourage the grease from sticking for a while.
17. Boil vinegar in your kettle to get rid of lime deposits.
18. Clean can openers with an old toothbrush and vinegar.
19. If your house has an unpleasant smell (cigarettes, pets, bad food) try boiling a pot of water and vinegar (about 1/4 cup vinegar per cup of water) on the stove for half an hour or so. 

Do you know of any other uses? Feel free to comment!

The Grocery List

Grocery lists are the key to saving money on groceries. They make you think about what you're buying, rather than just walking into the store and grabbing whatever catches your eye.

Just FYI: Everything here is in Canadian dollars, bought at a Canadian grocery store. If you're in the United States, you can probably find lower prices and spend less than my $400 a month!

I admit it, I have tried and failed to make a good grocery list multiple times. The problem was that in order to make a grocery list I needed a meal plan, and meal plans just weren't working for me. I'm not the type of person who plans out the meals for the week and eats what's scheduled for that day... I'm the type of person that comes home planning to cook a chicken and then suddenly decides to make pasta instead.

So this month I tried something different. Instead of a calendar, I made a chart. It has four columns: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks, and a row for every day of the month (the chart in the picture is cut off). Then I wrote in all the meals I normally make, repeating our favorites to fill in all the blanks. When I put two whole chickens in the "Dinner" column, I put two chicken sandwich days in the "lunch" column to use up the leftovers. I looked in our freezer and discovered a pile of ground beef, so I added pot stickers, lasagna, shepherd's pie and tacos to the list. I picked up my grocery store's flyer and discovered a 3/$5 sale on cookies, so they went in the "Snack" column.

When I was done I had breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for every day of the month planned with no dates attached, so I could buy all the ingredients (or at least the ones that wouldn't go bad before I used them) and make whatever I felt like on any given day... then my husband gave me a reality check ("4 weeks of groceries in one day?") and I split the list in half.

Then all I had to do was make up a grocery list for everything we didn't already have in the house. I added notes about sales so I'd remember to look for them and made a note to buy the bigger package of certain things that will be needed again later. Unless there's an amazing sale, the bigger package will almost always give you more for your money, so if it's something that won't go bad or that can be frozen to use later, get the bigger package... and if you're lucky enough to find that amazing sale and the smaller package is cheaper, get more than one!

For example, today I got the biggest bag of flour they had. Not only will it last me for months, but I saved close to $10 by not buying multiple smaller packages. However, the sale on instant mac and cheese made the single boxes cheaper than the individual boxes in the 12 pack, so I got a lot of individual boxes instead of the 12 pack I normally buy.

Once you have a list, it's about getting the best deal for the items on that list. I don't have the will power to be a couponer (you know, with the research and coupon printing and clipping and organized binder...), but if I see a coupon for something we normally buy anyways, I'll grab it. I also don't drive around to multiple stores, it's a waste of time and gas. Pick one store and get all your groceries there. If you can get toilet paper, laundry detergent and other household essentials there too, do it. The more things you can get in one place for a decent price, the better. It may not be the best price in the city, but it's not worth another $2 in gas to drive across town for milk that's $0.50 cheaper.

What you will find me doing is standing in an aisle squinting at the teeny tiny writing on the price tags. They all have writing, usually in the bottom right corner, that tells you a unit price or a price per 100ml or another unit of measurement. Normally the same unit will be used on similar products, making it easy to compare and figure out which product will give you the most for your money.

I've found that this is a trick not many people know about, and it really does help save money. As I mentioned before, you'll find that most of the time the larger package saves you money in the long run (assuming it's something you'll actually use up). However, it doesn't work for things like laundry or dishwasher detergent.

For example, today I got a 1L bottle of laundry detergent for $4.99. Usually I get a 2L bottle for about $6. The tags showed price per 100ml, which would lead you to believe that the 2L bottle was the better deal... but that 2L bottle says it's good for 40 loads and the 1L one says 50 loads, making the smaller bottle the better deal.

Today we managed to do 2 weeks worth of groceries and basic household stuff (toilet paper, laundry detergent, ect.) for about $170, though some of the things we bought will last us longer than 2 weeks. By the end of the two weeks, that number will be up to about $200 because we'll have to buy some more milk, bread and eggs... but believe me, without the list that number would have been much bigger!

My next task will be to make a spreadsheet to record prices of items.That way when I make a grocery list I can price it, and when I see a sale in a flyer I can see how good a sale it is. If you go to more than one grocery store, you might want to make one to compare prices so you can decide where to shop on your next trip. I only go to one store (the others are too far away), so that doesn't matter to me, but I do want to record the prices.