Happy Saturday Everyone!
I don't know about all of you out there but I HATE the smell of dog odor.
However, I LOVE dogs, so you see I have quite the conundrum.
Until now!
I'll let you all in on a little secret: I'm ADDICTED to Pinterest! There, the first step is over, I've admitted it. But seriously, it's an amazing site, and if you're not on it (and have a few hours to get sucked in) I highly recommend visiting it. Besides the oodles of glorious recipe ideas I find, my new addiction is cleaning tips. Since money is tight, every little thing I can do to save money is a must and I've become a huge fan, thanks to Pinterest, of homemade cleaning products. For the past month we've been using homemade laundry detergent and it's amazing and cheap! We also now use vinegar with essential oils (to make it smell pretty) as an all purpose cleaner (I don't think the stove and bathroom have ever been cleaner). But today I made something that I've been meaning to make for a while, and I'd love to share it with you because if you've got dogs, cats or just a stinky musty house this stuff is great.
I'm sure you've all heard of/used Febreze before. Well, at $5 bucks a bottle it can get pretty expensive when you're constantly trying to get potty training puppy smell out of your wall-to-wall carpeting and memory foam mattress topper. One day, while Pinning, I stumbled across the recipe for homemade Febreze. Hmm, this seemed like a win-win for me, it's homemade and supposedly works better than Febreze. I was skeptical, but I Pinned it anyway with the intention of making it soon. Weeks passed and I got busy cleaning other things and such and I forgot about the homemade Febreze.
Today I woke up and it hit me like a smelly punch right to the nose, Betty's accidents have really started to smell the place up even though I regularly clean up after the ones I see. Sometimes she goes on a stealth mission and I have no idea where the pee ends up. She also had a rash of bed-wetting incidents and we decided that it wasn't worth it to strip the bedding each time she peed since she was probably going to do it again, so we would spray the area with Woolite for pets and let it dry. Unfortunately it all started to get a little concentrated and I decided enough was enough.
Last night she slept through the whole night more or less and the 3 times she woke me up early this morning she made sure I knew to wake up and let her go potty so we didn't have a wet bed! Woo hoo! So off the stinky stanky sheets came and then came the task of de-stankifying the bed and carpets. I started with a homemade carpet refresher (baking soda and fabric softener. find the recipe here). My essential oils are currently hiding somewhere unknown so I used an 1/8 c fabric softener to mix with the baking soda. I also didn't have a nifty sprinkle cheese container so I used a bowl and a slotted spoon to sprinkle it on the floor and mattress. After an hour I vacuumed it all up, and did a sniff test. It definitely smelled better but it was still a bit stinky if you really sniffed. That's when I remembered the homemade Febreze! We had a leftover Febreze bottle laying around so I grabbed that and the rest of the ingredients and mixed some up. The recipe is super simple and pretty much everyone should have the ingredients on hand (if you don't have liquid fabric softener you can use essential oil). The recipe can be found here. Wow, this stuff works! I sprayed it all over the carpet in the living room, the couch, the mattress topper and our room's carpet. I used almost the entire bottle (which is ok, because apparently the cost to make this is around .15 cents!)!
Betty doesn't seem to notice a difference, in fact I think she liked it when the place was stinky as evidenced by her newest idea of a good time: Fart smelling. I've submitted her to dogshaming.com so look for my weirdo dog on there if they decide to post her. It's also a hilarious site that dog owners can relate to, so check it out!
Look at that face. She's proud of her silly ways.
Until Next Time
XOXO
Betty
Rachel & Josh
Love it. I like how you link your ideas and recipes for us.
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