Contrary to popular belief, decorating is not the only thing that goes on at The Seasonal Home…… I also clean (when I have to ;-)). But when it comes to cleaning, I will take any shortcut I can. And my favorite “way” to clean is to use as many natural products as possible, with vinegar being one of my favorites! The main reason vinegar is a favorite is because I have hard water. Hard water is a bad thing to have when your bathroom features glass doors and blocks, but I’m going to share my method for combining vinegar and paper towels that works great to combat this while cutting my cleaning effort by 90%!

I begin by soaking paper towels in vinegar. Each time I pull out a couple of paper towel squares from the vinegar, I apply it to my glass doors and block, smoothing it out (as if it were wallpaper). Strangely enough, this part of the job is somehow very Zen! (LOL)

I also apply individual pieces (of vinegar-soaked paper towel) to my shower head, Off/On handle and drain, but you should not leave this on for more than 15 minutes OR use paper towels soaked in a mixture of vinegar and water because straight vinegar can strip the finish off of metal.

Once I’ve covered everything in my vinegar-soaked paper towels, I walk away and come back a couple of hours later to remove them. The vinegar has done most of the work for me so all that’s left to do is use a use a natural cleanser product (like Bon Ami powder ) and a scratch-free, scrub sponge to remove the hard water deposits and leave my glass doors sparkling clean and spot-free! Check out the end result yourself –

I also have a lot of tile in my house, which was great when I had high traffic x 4 kids, but I would love to switch to wood floors now that they’re grown and on their own. Oh well… maybe some day… but for now, I’ve been focused on finding ways to keep my tile clean, especially the grout lines because I really dislike how dirty grout makes my floors look like grid work. So I tried a natural product I had on hand (Witch Hazel) and was very pleasantly surprised at the great job it did by lightening my grout at least 3 shades! I just applied it straight to the grout line, used an old toothbrush to give it a light scrub and soaked up the excess with an old rag. Check out the difference between the vertical and horizontal lines in this photo –

So, try out my ideas if you have some of the same issues and if you have any great cleaning tips, please feel free to share them in the COMMENTS section of this post. I’m sure everyone would love to check them out.