Painter and self-proclaimed neat freak Michael De Jong cleaned upscale Manhattan apartments to make ends meet.
Then, his daily use of store-bought cleaning products such as bleach and other surface cleansers made him ill.
De Jong’s experience eventually transformed him into the “green” Mr. Clean. He devised cleaning solution recipes containing inexpensive, organic ingredients, and shares some of them in his new book, “Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing,” (Sterling/Joost Elffers, $7.95). Room recently caught up with this author to find out more:
How did you figure out that the chemicals found in commercial cleaning products were making you sick?
Every single winter I would get bronchitis, and I’m not a sick kind-of-guy. One year I developed pneumonia and was forced out of commission for weeks. I started to realize that maybe it wasn’t my health, that it might be brought on by another factor. I’d been to the doctor, had physicals, but they would find nothing wrong with me. I really felt it was the cleaning products. So I called the (information) number on the bottle of one of the products and said, ‘Listen, I keep getting sick. Could it be from overexposure to (the chemicals in) your products?’ They said, ‘absolutely’ and that nobody was supposed to use this stuff every day.
How did you develop your homemade recipes?
I went to vintage almanacs I found in the library and bookstores. All of them had cute recipes to make your own cleaning products and household scrubs.
I started experimenting and making them and using them in my home to figure out which ones worked just as well as conventional cleaners. If these products were any safer, I might be able to eat them. I started mixing the substances, using baking soda, salt, lemon, Borax and vinegar.
I discovered that when you add a salt-based material like salt or baking soda to an acid, which would be lemon or vinegar, you are making a really great cleaning product … It alleviates the tension between the dirt and the surface, making it easier for the dirt to pop off that surface. It will take a bit of elbow grease, but there is no reason to use toxic chemicals.
How long have you been concocting these cleaners?
I spent close to a decade doing this. Every time I came up with a replacement for a conventional cleaner, I would write it down and shove it into an envelope.
I ended up replacing all the cleaning products I use for my own home with applications I discovered or invented. I was still using some commercial products in my (housekeeping) business. I thought people felt more comfortable with that. But I started using less and less of them until the point they were super-diluted, and then I started making my own.
What is your favorite homemade cleaner?
The easiest one is mixing a tablespoon of vinegar and a gallon of warm water. Stir it up and pour some into a spray bottle. It will clean every nonporous surface in your house, including tile, porcelain and glass tops. When you are done, you can pour it over your salad because it’s good for that, too.
Staff Writer Sheba R. Wheeler can be reached at 303-954-1283 or swheeler@denverpost.com.
