My best friend and I make homemade cleaner with white vinegar and essential oils, and I'm sharing the (very easy!) process of making this cleaner with you because it's a.) environmentally friendly b.) animal and people-friendly (aka, non-toxic, non-carcinogenic, and not a breathing hazard) c.) it cleans my kitchen counters better than ANY commercial chemical cleaner EVER has d.) it's cheap to make and e.) it has the added holistic-healing benefit of aromatherapy! Read on for the easy "recipe."

Ingredients:
---White Vinegar (about $1 for a large jug at any grocery store)
---Orange, Lime, and/or Lemon Essential Oil (you need at least one citrus oil, but can use more if you like the combined scent)
---Any Other Essential Oil(s) you think would combine well with one of the citrus oils above
---An empty spray bottle, well-rinsed. Any will do. I use an empty Method cleaner bottle just because it was already around the house.

First, fill your bottle with about 25 ounces of vinegar. If you want to keep things simple and only use one kind of essential oil (which is also cheaper, unless you already have essential oils around your house for other things), simply add 50-60 drops of a citrus essential oil to your vinegar, put the cap back on your bottle, shake lightly, and you're ready to start cleaning!

If you want to combine your citrus oil, you can do 30-40 drops of citrus combined with 20-25 of another. I really like the combination of Lime and Lavendar.

Today I tried this with Orange and Clove Bud, and the clove is pretty intense so I probably should have used less than 20 (maybe even as little as 5!) to get the desired effect. So, this isn't cut an dry. There's an art to it, but hopefully you'll have fun with the process of figuring out which scents you'd like to combine.

Citrus oils cut grease like no other! So make sure one of your oils (the one you use the most of) is a citrus oil. There's a reason why there are so many orange and lemon commercial cleaners (though the commercial chemical cleaners generally use a fragrance rather than an essential oil, which doesn't give the same grease-cutting power). This will clean your stove better than any other cleaner you've ever purchase, and will leave you with a fresh, safe-to-breathe smell to boot. :)