My Clean Kitchen

Today I am going to talk about a clean kitchen.  I live in a tiny house that was built in 1955.  The kitchen only has about 3 linear feet of counter space!  I was cleaning in there last week and got behind the stove, something that should have been done at least a couple of times per year but has not been done for at least two years.  I know, blech.  Anyway, I wanted to try using natural cleaning products again.  The last few times I wanted to do this I bought some baking soda, diluted it in some water, and found that it did not seem to do much other than remove odors.  Now that is great, but I wanted something that would remove grease, dirt, dust, etc.  This time I looked around on the internet and came up with this recipe for a multipurpose cleaner (it is not the same as any that I found, but if you do a search you will find many that are very close to this one):

2 teaspoons liquid Castile soap (I made this by cutting off 1/3 bar of KIRK'S Original Coco Castile soap and dissolving it in a mason jar with some warm water in it)
2 teaspoons Arm & Hammer Washing Soda
1/2 teaspoon 20 Mule Team Borax
4 cups warm water

Dissolve the Borax in a bit of the warm water and microwave it to get it hot enough if necessary.  Mix all of the ingredients in a 32-ounce spray bottle, putting the Borax water in first.  Discard any extra warm water.  If you want to make it smell good, add a few drops of essential oil.  I used Orange oil and Lemon oil, about 10 drops of each.

This stuff removed all of the grease on the wall behind the stove which had been there for a long time and it did it quickly.  

Here is the other part of this:  use one of those micro-fiber cloths.  I looked online and it was expensive to buy 12 of them, over $12 plus shipping.  But I went to a local store and found 12 of the same sized cloths for $7.95.  Done!  These cloths are amazing!  My mom sent me one last year and I have used it on mirrors and windows, but it works on everything.  The package that I bought comes with three different colors of cloths, so I am going to use the orange ones for the bathrooms, the green for the kitchen, and the yellow for the rest of the house.