This All Purpose Cleaner Will Finally Inspire You to Clean

If you’re anything like me, you tend to put off house cleaning until you simply can no longer stand to look at your streaky mirrors, stained countertops and foggy windows. Where the procrastination was once heavily influenced by the overwhelming number of cleaning products in my cleaning caddy, the lead time between dirty and clean has now been drastically reduced thanks to one handy dandy all-purpose cleaner.

Enter the vinegar cleaner. A mighty multitasker and powerful disinfectant, I spritz my vinegar cleaner liberally on grimy kitchen countertops, scummy mirrors, and cloudy glass windows, to name a few surfaces. For mirrors and glass, I recommend using two cloths; one to wipe down the mirror, and the other for polishing. Surfaces to avoid, however, are marble, granite, and other stone surfaces, which can erode due to the acids in vinegar.  

But isn’t the vinegary smell off-putting, you might ask? Not to me, at least. I find that the smell vanishes into thin air after a couple of minutes, and the time in between just reminds me of, well…vinegar. But I can think of worse things, like spraying my house full of toxic chemicals that irritate my skin and lungs. If the smell is too potent, drop in 12-24 drops of your favorite essential oil, which should do the trick. 

To make your own all-purpose vinegar cleaner, simply add equal parts of white distilled vinegar and water to a glass bottle with a spray nozzle (use a funnel to make liquid-pouring less unwieldy if you’ve got one handy) and shake them together. Add essential oils if desired, and then voila! The perfect one and done surface cleaner. And the best part about using this spray, in my opinion, is that you don’t need rubber gloves. (Not sure what it is about yellow rubber gloves, but I always find them impossible to take on and off.) Happy cleaning!