Day 5: Cleaning Supplies

We are already on Day 5 of 31 Days of Decluttering and Organizing!

It's Monday! Some of you have sent the kids off to school and are ready to make this week productive at home. Others are back to work and have less time than on a weekend. Just remember that you can do as much as you want with this. There is no pressure from me to spend more time than you are willing and able. I just want to give you some ideas about where clutter could be lurking in your home. We are getting closer to the holidays and a little decluttering before we get there is definitely a good thing.

Cleaning supplies.

Exciting I know.

They are a necessity. But how many do we really need? I've noticed in recently years that there is a lot of marketing out there for cleaning supplies. Everyone seems to do the job the best, right? I know people buy the new thinking it will work better. Sometimes it does. But often it doesn't so it gets tucked away and eventually pushed back behind those products you prefer to use.

Today let us consider what we really need to clean our home. Some would say baking soda and vinegar. And they might be right! I've heard about a lot of DIY cleaners that use these ingredients. I personally don't, but I have started to gravitate towards products that say they are more natural. Some of them seem to be multi purpose, so even better.

Eh, instead of touting which products are right and wrong lets just take a look in all the places we keep our cleaning supplies. For us, that is under our kitchen sink (and a nearby cabinet) and above the dryer in our laundry room.

If you see things in the back of your storage areas, those might be just the items we are looking to find. The cleaners you don't like or don't use any more. Gather those up. Consider if they are safe to discard in the trash or down the sink. If not, do you know someone to give them to that would use and appreciate them. Do you have a place in your town to take hazardous waste items?

If you have similar types cleaners but two partial containers you might take a few minutes to combine them. If there is the smallest amount left of something make an effort to use it up this month.

Want to know the few cleaners we have in our home? Laundry detergent, Fels Naptha soap for stains, dish soap, dish washer detergent, toilet bowl cleaner, three bottles of multipurpose cleaner (yes, trying to find the right natural product for our shower), and a bottle of castile soap (which I should try on our shower, but use on the kitchen sink).  Nope I don't have glass cleaner. I either use a Norwex cloth or one of the natural cleaners. My point in sharing is that it really doesn't take much to clean a home and specialty cleaners aren't always what they are cracked up to be.

I should add that I use reusable microfiber clothes for much of our cleaning so I don't have containers of wipes or many other disposable products. The two disposable products related to cleaning we currently have are paper towels and Swiffer cleaning pads. I'm trying to use up the disposable Swiffer pads and go back to using a piece of flannel fabric. Works just as good for us!

I expect that you may have been able to sift through your cleaners in ten minutes, more or less depending on how many places you needed to look. So did you declutter some of your cleaning supplies? You weren't using them anyway were you?