Vinegar

I'll be the first to admit I have a bit of an unhealthy attachment to name brand cleaning supplies. To me, there's nothing that smells "clean" like Pine-Sol. And, considering the fact that I buy maybe one bottle of it a year, I figure it's not hurting my budget any.

However, if you have a penchant for multiple types of cleaning supplies...all name brand...it can rack up quite a bill at the grocery counter. One thing that I've found that works very well as a substitute in a variety of situations is vinegar.

Up until now, I've mainly just used vinegar to clean out of my microwave (just microwave a mixture of it and water for a minute or two to get the icky microwave smell out), but yesterday I discovered a new purpose. Our carpet in our home is pretty old, and, when we moved in, it wasn't steam-cleaned. Over the past few months, random spots have showed up...and, of course, we have a new puppy. Enough said. So, I went on a deep cleaning rampage yesterday, and liberally sprinkled a mixture of water/vinegar over any spots in the carpet. I left it for a few minutes, used a wet/dry vac to soak it up, and the spots were gone! There were a few of the weird unknown spots that are still lightly there, but I was pretty pleased with the results of the vinegar/water combo. And, yes, my living room did smell like vinegar for a few minutes, but my Scentsy candle took it out quite quickly.

So, out of curiosity, I did some more research on this cleaning tool and found this fantastic list of different things you can use vinegar for. Check it out! Vinegar can be purchased quite easily, and, after this list, is a vital component of a thrifty pantry. :)