How to Clean Your Home With Three Ingredients Instead of Thirty

Under our kitchen sink used to be a small museum of cleaning products. Separate sprays for the counter, the stove, the bathroom, the glass. A tub of something for the toilet. Stuff for the grout. Stuff for stainless steel. Most of them half-empty, most of them bought because the previous one ran out at an inconvenient moment.

At some point I started reading the ingredient lists and realised most of these products were variations on the same two or three active ingredients, diluted in water and sold at a significant premium in a plastic bottle with a purpose-specific label.

We now clean the entire house with three things. This isn’t minimalism as a lifestyle — it’s just that three things turn out to be enough.

The three things

Castile soap. This is the workhorse. It’s a plant-based soap concentrate — originally made with olive oil, now usually a blend of oils — that cleans almost everything. We use Dr. Bronner’s, which is widely available and what we’ve always come back to after trying other brands. The 32-ounce bottle lasts us months because it’s concentrated: a few drops of castile soap in a spray bottle of water cleans counters. A small squeeze on a cloth cleans the stovetop. A diluted mix in a mop bucket cleans floors. It works on dishes, on hands, on the outside of appliances. One bottle.

White vinegar. Disinfects, cuts grease, removes mineral deposits, and cleans glass streak-free. We keep a spray bottle with equal parts vinegar and water and use it for anything castile soap isn’t the right fit for — windows, mirrors, the inside of the microwave, the coffee maker. The smell disappears as it dries. Don’t use it on stone surfaces (granite, marble) — it’s acidic and will dull the finish over time.

Baking soda. The scrubber. For anything that needs physical abrasion — the inside of the oven, grout, the ring in the bathtub, a burnt pot. Sprinkle, wet slightly, scrub. Combined with vinegar it fizzes, which is satisfying but doesn’t actually clean any better than either ingredient alone — the fizzing is a reaction, not a cleaning action. Still, it works, and it’s cheap in bulk.

That’s it. Three ingredients, a couple of spray bottles, and a stack of cloth rags.

What we make and how

All-purpose counter spray: One teaspoon of castile soap in a 16oz glass spray bottle, fill with water. That’s the entire recipe. Shake gently before using. This is what we reach for most often — works on every surface in the kitchen and bathroom.

Glass and mirror spray: Equal parts white vinegar and water in a spray bottle. Spray, wipe with a cloth. No streaks.

Scrubbing paste: Mix baking soda with just enough dish soap or castile soap to form a paste. Use it on the oven, the bathtub, stubborn stains on pots and pans. Rinse well after.

Floor cleaner: About a quarter cup of castile soap in a bucket of warm water. Works on tile, hardwood, and vinyl.

Toilet cleaner: Sprinkle baking soda in the bowl, add a splash of vinegar, let it fizz, then scrub with a toilet brush.

The things I kept

I want to be honest about this. We still have a bottle of bleach under the sink for genuinely serious situations — the kind of deep disinfecting you’d want after someone in the house has been properly ill. And we keep a commercial grout cleaner for the tile in the shower, because the baking soda approach works but takes more effort than I’m willing to give on a regular basis.

The goal was not to be pure about this. The goal was to stop buying twelve different bottles of plastic every few months. That goal is achieved.

The environmental side

Commercial cleaning products are one of the larger sources of indoor air pollutants. VOCs — volatile organic compounds — off-gas from many conventional cleaners and can affect indoor air quality, particularly with poor ventilation. Castile soap, vinegar, and baking soda don’t have this problem. They also rinse away without harm to the watershed.

The packaging waste reduction is significant for a family that used to go through several spray bottles every month. Glass bottles with a refillable castile soap concentrate essentially eliminate that stream.

The money side

A 32oz bottle of Dr. Bronner’s costs around $15 and lasts our family at least three months, replacing what we used to spend on multiple specialised cleaners. A gallon of white vinegar is around $3. A 5-pound bag of baking soda is about $5. Annual spend for all three: somewhere around $60-70 for the whole house, compared with considerably more for a cabinet full of single-purpose products.

None of this required us to change how we clean. Just what we clean with.

One transition tip

Don’t throw out everything you have and replace it in one go. When a cleaning product runs out, replace it with one of the three. It takes a few months to make the full transition, and by then you have a sense of which approach works for which task in your house. That gradual shift is also a lot more affordable than buying everything at once.

The cabinet under our sink is mostly empty now. It took some getting used to — the instinct was that more products meant more clean. It doesn’t. It just means more bottles.