Quick DIY Cleaning Wipes

The colorful upcycled t-shirts make it look pretty too.

Does your bathroom ever get yucky long before you have time to really clean it?  Mine does.  I usually blame the hubby, but the truth is, we all have our own messes in there.  Am I right ladies?  Plus, with two dogs and a cat, there is typically a pretty high risk that you are going to have some sort of fur on any given surface at any given time.  Anyway, I always clean my kitchen and dining areas really well. Hubby some might say that I am a tiny bit OCD. I say that we eat stuff that comes from those areas and it needs to be clean.  That never changes. However, when things get super busy, the first thing that falls to the wayside is cleaning the bathroom.  No one likes to do it and frankly, it's not like we eat in there or anything.

Cutting up the t-shirt rags to see how many are needed.

Old t-shirts being upcycled.

So in order to combat yucky bathrooms, I have decided to start actually doing a quick wipe down of surfaces every morning.  (I haven't started this yet, so we will see how it goes.)  In order to make myself actually do this, I realized that I need to make it easy on myself.  I am never going to go to the kitchen where the spray and towels are located to walk it all back to the bathroom before I've even had my coffee.  Trust me, it's not going to happen.  But, I am perfectly capable of remembering to do this if I have the materials already in the correct room.  I think.

This is how many of the rags fit in the jar.

I am also not going to spend any money on anything to put this together.  The materials need to all be located in my house already.  Of course, I am a bit of a hoarder collector of things that I can reuse so this shouldn't be a problem for me.  I simply cut up old t-shirts into scraps large enough to use as a wipe and added them to a mason jar with a combination of vinegar, water, and antibacterial essential oils.  I can't really take credit for this idea though.  I saw something similar on pinterest awhile back, but it used ingredients that I still don't trust, like borax.  Honestly, the borax is unnecessary anyway because the vinegar and oils will kill anything. I decided to just use my own combination of these cleaners that I already use successfully everywhere else in my house.  So today I give you my recipe for antibacterial cleaning wipes.  Next time I plan on using lemon infused vinegar for the job, but my newest batch isn't done infusing yet. See the instructions for that here.
 

Finished product. 

Materials Needed:

Quart Sized Mason Jar with a Lid

10-15 Old Rags or Cut Up Old T-shirts

Ingredients:

1 cup filtered water
1 cup vinegar
20 drops lemon essential oil
10 drops lavender essential oil
5 drops tea tree essential oil
5 drops frankincense essential oil

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a mason jar and swirl to combine.  Add rags or t-shirts pushing down to get them submerged in the cleaning solution.  If needed, put lid on and flip jar upside down to saturate all of the rags. 

Do you have any easy tricks for keeping your home clean?  I'd love for you to share them with me in the comments section below.

-Donna