What can be more readily available in every house than salt? Not only is it required by our bodies to perform a variety of essential functions, it also is a cheap, green and effective cleaning aide. Here are my 9 favorite cleaning uses for salt:

1. Scouring - Salt works as an effective yet gentle scouring agent. Salt also serves as a catalyst for other ingredients, such as vinegar, to boost cleaning and deodorizing action. For a basic soft scrub, make a paste with lots of salt, baking soda and dish soap and use on appliances, enamel, porcelain, etc.

2. Drain Cleaner - Pour salt mixed with hot water down the kitchen sink regularly to deodorize and keep grease from building up.

3. Water Ring Removal - Gently rub a thin paste of salt and vegetable oil on the white marks caused by beverage glasses and hot dishes on wooden tables

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Here’s another green laundry tip for you – How to remove sweat stains. Have a favorite white shirt that’s looking a bit yellow around the pits? Try soaking the stains in a solution made from crushing two (uncoated) aspirin and mixing it with 1/2 C of warm water for 2 to 3 hours.

Sources: ColumbusParent.com, HouseCleaningCentral.com, & ehow.com

Dying eggs this year? Want to use all-natural dyes? Check out this article by Rachel Tayse of Hounds in the Kitchen on making egg dyes from edible materials like red cabbage, purple beets, ground tumeric, blueberries, tea, and coffee.

Encouraged by my friend Vanessa Prentice, I made egg dyes from edible materials this year. I was surprised to find that natural dyes are easy to make, completely safe to consume, and don’t stain your fingertips.

I made dyes from purple cabbage, red beet, and ground tumeric, pictured left to right above. Other edibles that Vanessa recommends include blueberries (purple color), tea (light brown), and coffee (dark brown). Green is a particularly difficult color to achieve, she says.

I boiled the edible materials in water with a splash of vinegar to act as a mordant. A mordant is a chemical that encourages dye to attach to a surface. These mixes simmered until the colorful edible until the liquid was brightly colored, about an hour.

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Wait! Before you toss that stained or smelly kitchen container in the recycle bin, try these tips to recover it:

- Cover the stains with vinegar and let sit for an hour. Vinegar is a natural deodorizer.

- Make a paste out of a mixture of baking soda and either water or vinegar, and use it to scrub any stained areas.

- My personal favorite – set the container out in the sun! You’ve seen what the sun does to candy wrappers on the ground. Imagine what it’ll do to that new tomato stain on your otherwise perfectly good container! A few hours should do the trick.

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One of my clients recently remodeled her bathroom and installed her dream bath tub – a fancy shmancy jacuzzi tub with 10 perfectly-placed jets. Her house is small and this is the only tub in it, so it’s a big deal for her. And of course, she had concerns about how to keep it clean and healthy since water can sometimes be left standing in the pipes after use.

Surface Cleaning

Many of the nicer new tubs are made from acrylic or fiberglass, which is great to look at, but scratches easily.

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Coming home to a house filled with chaos and clutter day after day can be emotionally overwhelming for people whose lives are already stressed to the max. After a hard day at work, walking in to your place of refuge only to find it in disorder can be well… Defeating. Yet organizing and decluttering seem to be one of the most dreaded tasks I hear about from my clients. So here are some pro tips that will hopefully make conquering your clutter a little less intimidating.

1. Take baby steps – Set small goals for yourself and then work through them. It’s not realistic to declutter your entire house in a day, perhaps not even in a weekend! So pick a space, and set a realistic, specific, measurable goal. “I’m going to work through 1/2 of the spare bedroom before I go to bed tonight.”

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Are you a veteran? Do you know a veteran or veteran’s family in the Columbus area in need? As part of our strong community service standards, Mosaic Cleaning provides two volunteer cleaning services per month through Cleaning for Heroes.

Cleaning for Heroes is committed to promoting a healthy, clean home environment for our disabled or elderly community heroes and their families. They accomplish this mission by providing free house cleaning services to help make their lives easier, as well as other services such as window cleaning, carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning, landscaping, pest control and much, much more! Mosaic Cleaning is proud to be a Charter Member of this organization.

Whether our heroes belong to the United States Military, our local police force or fire department, providing free cleaning services is our way of saying “Thank you!” for the sacrifices our community heroes make every day for us, our community and our country.

We’ve all done it – left a load of clothes in the washing machine just a little too long, only to find them smelling sour when we finally remember they’re there. And if you’re smell-sensitive like me, sometimes just rewashing isn’t enough to kill the odor. So how do you get rid of that tell-tale smell without a dozen rewashes?

Add a single teaspoon of baking soda to the drum of the washing machine with your load of clothes to cut odors!

If you’re like me, the coming of Spring is synonymous with opening the blinds in an effort to let every ounce of that long-awaited sunshine in to the house. Problem is, after a winter of rain, snow, and dog and cat-noses pressed against glass, my windows are filthy! Maybe yours are too. When you’re ready to clean them, sure – you can go with a commercial cleaning product and a half a roll of paper towels. Or you can try a green approach using one of these cheap, easy cleaning recipes and this week’s Mosaic Mention: the squeegee.

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Even though this is my business’s site, I try to stay connected since I currently am the business, and so from time to time you may find posts here that are more about the experience of owning Mosaic Cleaning than about helpful hints on how to clean your house. It’s my hope that this balance works for you, and perhaps even brings the personal touch that I offer to my cleaning clients to my readers as well.

That being said, this week’s post is about my 2011 goals for Mosaic Cleaning. It’s that time of year, and my friends over at LightSwitch Creative do a really excellent job of sitting me down, asking the right questions to get to the bottom of what’s important to me both personally and professionally, and then helping me set realistic, achievable, measurable goals to drive the business from where it is to where I want it to be. Without giving too much away, here are some of my goals for 2011.

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