Homemade kitchen cleaner

This is a combination of being cheap and also worrying about chemicals. For the kitchen counters, at least. I'm still very pro-chemical when it comes to the bathrooms.

{DIYing it}

I love the Method pink grapefruit cleaner but I got sick of paying for it so I started searching around for a DIY method. There are tons of resources but I wanted to start simple and this post was the most helpful for me.

I picked up a jug of white vinegar at Costco, started saving our citrus peels, and a few weeks later I had three different cleaners. It helps that we're doing this during cocktail season, because we go through citrus much faster. Cleaning up the peels is a little bit of pain, because they need to have all the fruit removed from them. I found lemons to be easy. The grapefruit you can use a small knife to just cut through the pith since it's so thick. The limes suck. Sorry. The peels are so thin that it isn't as easy to get them entirely clean.

I didn't worry about exact measurements, just packed the jars full with peels and herbs and then poured vinegar over them.

I tried lime + thyme, grapefruit + mint and lemon + basil. They're all functional but the lemon + basil is so much better that I may stick with that one from now on. The lemon scent completely overtook the vinegar and it's amazing - not at all that chemical lemon smell that you normally get from a cleaner. The lime is only vaguely citrus-y and the grapefruit is still mostly vinegar scented even after I added a few drops of grapefruit essential oil to the mix. I still use all three because I find the vinegar smell more palatable than the idea of wasting all that peeling effort.

I still have a ton of grapefruit peels waiting in the freezer, so I might try another batch and see if reducing the amount of vinegar and really increasing the amount of peels will help. The lemon was a bit more tightly packed than the grapefruit and I wonder if that may have contributed to its success.

You can get away without purchasing all the stuff on the list if you save your spray bottles. I'd been planning to try this for a while so I had a few empty Method bottles hanging out under the sink. Mine do not have cute labels on the front, but I did scribble on them with a black sharpie so I would know which one is which.

Looking forward to January, when oranges are back in season. I want to test that one out too.

P.S. - I think I promised I'd get an LA guide ready for summer travel MONTHS ago. Sorry. It's finally almost ready and I'll have it up tomorrow. It was a beast of a post and I keep adding to it.