Got grease? Dish soap to the rescue!

I am not a dedicated cleaner, so when I do put effort into cleaning, I want to do it well in the hope that I can then walk away and not have to clean again for a good year or so. Rarely works, though. I also feel like I've been brainwashed quite thoroughly by the American consumer mindset to believe that I need tailored products for each specific cleaning job. Something not working? Go and buy a better product! Do you do this too?

Case in point. I was quizzing friends over the summer about what they use to clean wood. I didn't get many answers. So I asked my new BFF Google and got some options. I set my heart on a Mrs. Meyers All Purpose cleaning product for the simple reason that it said it cleans wood and I didn't have any, and I really wanted to buy something from Mrs. Meyers since many people seem to just love her! Then I thought about it a little bit. I realized I had another natural brand of all purpose cleaner already, and I should at least try that first. How different could it be? Truth be told, I wasn't thrilled. I like the stuff well enough for many jobs, but it wasn't cleaning off all the greasy fingerprints my darling children had left on the wood dining room chairs. I'm glad I had resisted the urge to go out and buy something new. Who knows if the Mrs. Meyers brand would have worked any better on wood.

What I did do next is consult the infamous home-keeping diva of America. Yes, Martha. And do you know what she suggested? It's brilliant in its simplicity (and I probably gave it away from my post title): dish soap. I squirted a little dish soap (the kind for hand-washing dishes vs. the automatic dishwasher kind) onto a wet rag. Voila! Greasy paw prints gone! Now I need not fear feeding my kids egg-rolls at the dining room table ever again. There is hope! There is cleanliness! There is justice and goodness in the world! (OK. I'll stop now). And I didn't need to buy anything special or new. 

But wait! There's more! (OK, now I sound like an infomercial). Last night my daughter was shaking up the bottle of balsamic vinaigrette and lo and behold, the cap was not all the way snapped down on the cruet. Yes, you guessed it. Salad dressing shower. And wouldn't you know it? She'd just taken a shower, washed her hair and put on clean clothes. Sigh. But here's the great part! Dish soap once again comes to the rescue!! It got all the balsamic vinegar and oil out of her shirt with very little elbow grease on my part! I've even gotten bike chain grease off of clothing with dish soap. This is a miracle cleaner if there ever was one!!

My cleaning work is now finished here. I think I'll take the rest of the year off.