My favorite cleaning products are not name brands. They are baking soda, bleach and vinegar. I do use some name brands, like windex for my mirrors and windows. But my very favorites are those first three I names.

If I want a white bathtub or sink I use baking soda. It is mildly abrasive, like ajax, so it cleans well. It's safe to use, we put it in our food. And it whitens like nothing else I've ever found. It'll even whiten your teeth.

Once a year our apartment manager hires carpet cleaners and they go through the entire complex. They shampoo once, then they rinse once. The carpet looks great but I used to spend the several months trying to rinse the rest of the soap out. I have small children so they spill things. When I would dampen the carpet to wash what they spilled I could still smell the shampoo until I had it completely rinsed. Until I discovered vinegar. A solution of watered down vinegar on the carpet disolved the soap and made it much easier and faster to rinse away. I will quite often use a vinegar rinse after washing things with soap just to make certain all the soap is gone.

My toddler has not yet been toilet trained. Sometimes she has accidents and poops in the bath. When this happens I use bleach. I bleach the tub. I bleach the toys that were in the tub. I learned this from a friend who was a corpman in the navy. That is what they used at the hospital she worked at to disinfect. That is what she uses in her home. Her children are extremely healthy so I figured she must be doing something right. When I started doing this I was disgusted by how much mildew I found had been growing inside my childrens' bathtoys. It's all gone now, thanks to the bleach.