If your house is anything like mine, most of the floors are covered by carpet, and the carpet picks up EVERY LITTLE THING.  With a toddler, I find myself having to vacuum 2 or 3 times a week!  For as long I have been been in my own home, I’ve been using store bought carpet freshener powder–you know, the one that you sprinkle on your carpet, let it sit for about 10 minutes then vacuum up?  With as much carpet as I have though, I was using almost a whole canister of the powder every time I vacuumed! At $3 dollars a pop, this was getting a bit expensive.  So I had the awesome idea to make my own carpet powder!

It was as easy as a little Googling and a trip to the Dollar Store.  You might even have all the ingredients in your home already!

This is all you need. Minus the chicken cookie jar.

The best part about this powder is you can basically make it in any fragrance you want.  Imagine–carpets that smell like cinnamon rolls or mint chocolate chip!  I had a TON of Bath & Body Works home fragrance oils laying around, so I chose to make my powder in their Winter scent.

You will need a container with a shaker top to put the powder in after it’s made.  We had just recently thrown out our Magic Bullet blender, but I dug and found one of the old mugs with the shaker top to fit it.  Lucky, right?  I love that it’s a mug because the handle makes it easy to hold and shake.   But you can use anything you might have available…some other good containers are old grated parmesan cheese bottles, or even an empty canister from a store-bought carpet powder.

My mug with shaker top.

All you have to do is get a BIG PLASTIC bowl, and mix equal parts baking soda and borax.  It is very important that both the mixing bowl and the utensil with which you are stirring are made out of plastic–any metal will make the chemicals react.

For my powder, I mixed one cup of borax, and one cup of baking powder.  Use the back of the spoon to break up any clumps, and mix until combined.  Then add drops of the fragrance oil–I used about 10 drops for my mixture and it was quite potent!  If you don’t want such a highly fragranced powder, you can use about 6-8 drops instead.

It will look something like this when you’re done.  Carefully put the powder, scoop by scoop into your container.  I wouldn’t fill it all the way to the top, you need some room for the powder to move around and actually come out when it’s poured.  Put the top on the shaker and you’re ready to go.  Sprinkle liberally on your carpets, let sit for 10-15 minutes and vacuum.  You’ve just made your house smell great in a safe, economical way.  Don’t you feel awesome?  🙂