How I Started Making My Own Cleaning Products (And Never Looked Back)
Okay so I’m gonna be honest with you — I was one of those people who had like twelve different spray bottles under the sink. One for the bathroom tiles. One for the glass. One “heavy duty” thing I bought once and used maybe twice. Another one that was supposedly “eco-friendly” but still smelled like a chemical plant somehow. My monthly grocery bill had this quiet little cleaning tax built in and I never really thought about it until one day I looked at the receipt and realized I spent almost thirty bucks just on cleaning stuff. For a one-bedroom apartment. That I barely clean as often as I should.
How can I make homemade cleaning products?
That was embarrassing enough to make me actually look it up.
And then I fell down this rabbit hole of homemade cleaning products and — look, I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like something your aunt posts about on Facebook with stock photos of lemons. But hear me out because this actually works and it’s shockingly simple and I kind of hate myself for not doing this sooner.
The stuff you actually need to start
Before I get into the actual recipes or whatever, here’s the thing about homemade cleaning products that nobody tells you upfront: you don’t need much. Like, embarrassingly little. Most of this stuff you probably already have in your kitchen.
The core ingredients are:
White vinegar. Baking soda. Dish soap. Rubbing alcohol. And maybe some essential oils if you care about your apartment smelling nice, which I do because I have a dog and let’s just say it’s necessary.
That’s basically it. You can make probably eighty percent of your cleaning routine from those five things. The rest is just knowing what to mix with what and what to absolutely never mix together (I’ll get to that because there’s one combo that can straight up hurt you and people don’t talk about that enough).
All-purpose spray, which is where I started
The first thing I made was an all-purpose spray because that’s what I used the most. I had this big plastic spray bottle I’d emptied out, rinsed it, and filled it with:
Half white vinegar, half water. Then a few drops of dish soap. And about fifteen drops of tea tree oil because I read it has some antimicrobial properties and also it smells clean without being overpowering.
Shake it gently. Done.
I wiped down my kitchen counters with it that same afternoon and honestly? It worked great. Cut through grease, didn’t leave any weird residue, and the vinegar smell fades really fast once it dries. That whole “but it’ll make everything smell like a salad” thing is way overstated.
I use this spray on pretty much everything now. Countertops, stovetop (when it’s cool), bathroom sink, doorknobs, random sticky spots I find on surfaces and choose not to investigate further.
One thing: don’t use it on marble or granite. The acid in the vinegar messes with natural stone surfaces over time. I learned that from a comment section rabbit hole and I’m passing it on to you.
Baking soda is the sleeper hit of this whole thing
I thought baking soda was just for baking and that one science fair volcano everyone made in like fourth grade. Turns out it’s one of the most useful cleaning things you can have.
For scrubbing? Just sprinkle some directly on a damp sponge and go to town. It’s mildly abrasive so it gets stuff off without scratching, and it deodorizes at the same time. I use this on my bathroom sink, the inside of the microwave, and my stovetop grates.
For the garbage disposal? Dump some baking soda in, pour a little vinegar after it, let it fizz and do its thing for a few minutes, then run hot water. Smells way better after. Takes maybe thirty seconds of actual effort.
For carpet smells? Sprinkle baking soda liberally on the carpet, let it sit for like twenty minutes minimum (I usually do it before I shower and vacuum after), then vacuum it up. It genuinely pulls odors out. My living room smells significantly less like dog after I started doing this regularly.
Glass cleaner that actually works
Okay so I tried the all-purpose vinegar spray on windows and it was… fine but not perfect. Left some streaks. So I messed around with ratios and landed on this:
Two cups of water, half a cup of rubbing alcohol, half a cup of white vinegar. Mix in a spray bottle. Spray, wipe with a microfiber cloth in a circular motion, done.
No streaks. Way better than the blue stuff I used to buy, which I’m now convinced was partly just marketing because the mirrors in my apartment look the same if not better.
The rubbing alcohol is what makes the difference here — it evaporates faster which is why you don’t get those annoying streaks.
Toilet cleaner because yes we’re going there
This one feels more intimidating than it is. Here’s what I do:
Pour about half a cup of baking soda into the bowl. Add half a cup of white vinegar. Let it fizz up for like ten minutes. Scrub with the toilet brush. Flush.
For the outside of the toilet and the seat, I just use the all-purpose spray from before.
It cleans fine, it doesn’t bleach anything (which honestly I’m fine with because I wasn’t really scrubbing my toilet to get it photoshoot-white anyway), and I don’t have to handle those little blue tablets that terrify me for some reason.
The one thing I have to say about mixing stuff
Please never mix bleach with vinegar. I know I’m not talking about bleach in this whole post but I want to say it anyway because someone reading this might decide to freestyle and accidentally create chlorine gas in their bathroom. That is a real thing that can happen and it’s dangerous.
Similarly, don’t mix hydrogen peroxide and vinegar in the same bottle at the same time. You can use them separately, one after the other, that’s actually a decent disinfecting combo — but mixed together they make peracetic acid which is corrosive and not something you want to be spraying around your kitchen.
The homemade stuff is safe when you stick to the recipes. It’s when people start improvising blindly that things get weird.
What I couldn’t fully replace
I’m not gonna pretend I threw out every commercial product I own because that would be a lie. I still keep a small bottle of actual disinfectant spray for specific situations — like when someone’s been sick, or raw chicken juice got somewhere it shouldn’t have. Vinegar and baking soda don’t kill everything. They’re not hospital-grade disinfectants and I’m not gonna act like they are.
So I think the honest framing is: homemade stuff handles probably ninety percent of regular daily cleaning really well. For the other ten percent where you actually need to kill bacteria or deal with mold that’s gotten out of hand, keep one real disinfectant around. That’s not a failure, that’s just being realistic.
How much money I actually saved
I went back and looked at roughly what I was spending on cleaning products before. It was averaging out to somewhere around twenty to thirty-five dollars a month depending on what needed replacing. Now I’m spending maybe five dollars a month on vinegar and a big box of baking soda lasts me like three months easily.
Rubbing alcohol I go through slower than I expected. Dish soap I already bought for dishes. The essential oils were an upfront cost that’s now stretched over probably a year of use.
It’s not going to change your life financially but it adds up more than you’d think. And I like that I actually understand what I’m putting on my surfaces now, which I genuinely never thought about before but kind of care about now.
Getting started without overthinking it
The mistake I almost made was buying a bunch of supplies before I tried anything. Don’t do that. Grab one spray bottle (or just rinse out one you already have). Make the all-purpose vinegar spray. Try it for a week. If you like it, then maybe expand.
You don’t have to go all in. You don’t have to have a perfectly labeled pantry with matching glass bottles. You don’t have to care about it as like a whole lifestyle thing. It can just be: I make one or two cleaning products at home, it costs less, it works fine, moving on.
That’s where I am with it. Nothing dramatic. Just a slightly better system that I’m honestly kind of annoyed took me this long to find.