Vinegar and whatnow?

Apparently for a cleaner to be "green,"
it literally has to be green.

We have tried all sorts of cleaning products for the bathroom and kitchen over the years, with varying degrees of success.  When we first bought our house we used anything we could get our hands on, like Soft Scrub, Windex, Tilex, CLR, Comet...basically anything in the household chemicals aisles at Lowe's or Walmart.  Even some semi-hippie eco-friendly cleaners from Seventh Generation and Clorox's "Green Works," which I think is really just regular cleaners dyed green.  Some worked, some didn't, and some are still sitting on the shelf in our storage room.  For the bathtub and shower we tried various incarnations of the classic scrubbing bubbles, including a particularly bad store-brand version, but nothing seemed to work all that well.  Or rather, they worked but were far too expensive to use regularly.  For a while we tried using a weird daily shower cleaner but aside from leaving the bathroom smelling of ammonia and artificial flowers, it didn't seem to do all that much.  It's not that these products didn't get our showers and sinks clean, but they just weren't that impressive when compared to how much money we had to spend on them.  Particularly the shower cleaners, where taking care of the tub could use up a fourth of one bottle of cleaner.

So a few days ago, after some encouragement by my wife as well as some checking online, I decided to give plain ol' vinegar and baking soda a try. You know, that combination that kids used in 4th grade science fairs to make volcanos? Yeah, that stuff.  I had an empty spray bottle lying around that I managed to convert into a bottle of vinegar spray using nothing more than that jack-of-all-trades, the Sharpie marker:

Notice how the bottle of cleaner has been cleverly transformed into a bottle of vinegar.

I took the spray bottle into the bathroom, doused the shower floor with it, poured on some baking soda, and sat back to watch the foaming commence.  And foam it did, for a minute or so, after which I scrubbed the whole works for a while, rinsed everything off with water, and voilà! One clean shower.  The whole process was remarkably simple, and didn't leave me feeling woozy like often happens if I'm stuck in a small bathroom full of cleaner fumes.  Though if you don't like the smell of vinegar, you might be out of luck with this method :)