| Clean the house like Granny did
Before the days of powerful vacuum cleaners and supermarket sprays, our grandmothers cleaned their homes in a much simpler way. "Today, we make it using olive oil instead, but it's not much different and it works in the same way. It's non-toxic, safe to use, and was originally used to soften water and make white clothes brighter. As well as being effective, simple, natural cleaning products have environmental (and therefore health) benefits, Lawrence says. You can absorb them through your skin and breathe them in. It's made from a natural mineral, sodium borate, which was discovered over 4,000. It's handy for the home, and it's completely safe to use around animals and children. "Granny did not use proprietary cleaners laden with bleach and other products that claimed to work miracles," she writes. There weren't really viable natural alternatives, but now there are. Mrs White's favourite product for most house-hold cleaning tasks was vinegar. When she died, her house-hold cleaning tips - which she had scribbled down through the years and tucked inside notebooks - were inherited by my great aunt, then passed on to me. Lawrence has tweaked a few of her recipes for cleaning products, but Mrs White's ideas and principles are still relevant today. "She spent all her teenage years in service as a housemaid, then worked as a cook," explains Lawrence. Inspired by the tradition of leaving bowls of chestnuts on windowsills to deter spiders, Roullier White sells a spider repellent spray called Leg It. "Spiders 'smell' through their feet," Lawrence explains. If you spritz your window frames and doors, they won't come near. "Borax crops up again and again," Brenda says. Until about 10 years ago, natural cleaning products weren't that widely available. One cleaning expert inspired by the past is Lawrence Roullier White, the founder of Roullier White, a London-based boutique that sells, among other things, an array of natural cleaning products named after his late great grandmother, Mrs White. "It works along with any fly spray but doesn't contain chemical pesticides or toxic heavy metals as some off-the-shelf sprays do. |
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Clean the house like Granny did
