Naturally Deodorize The Smelliest Areas Of Your Home With This Budget-Friendly Find

What is the smelliest area of your home, where you walk past and know it's time to do some cleaning? It could be due to smelly shoes from soccer practice, the spot in the living room where the dog always sits, or that corner of your closet you haven't cleaned out before. You can naturally deodorize some of these areas using Zote, a highly affordable bar of soap that doubles as a cleaning powerhouse. Though commonly used for laundry, it has various other uses that are hard to ignore. You may be able to purchase a bar of Zote for $1.50 to $3, depending on your area and what you buy, and get numerous uses out of it, making it quite affordable.

A bar of Zote can be an excellent way to remove stains and rubbed-in dirt from clothing, especially when you need a solution to help with handwashing your clothes. The product, made in Mexico and used for decades, has a notable pink color to it. It's biodegradable and contains natural ingredients. A few other reasons you can trust Zote for these projects include it's overall color-safe (though you'll always want to test it on a hidden area for any delicate materials) and phosphate-free. Used properly, Zote can be an odor-busting cleaning agent with good reliability on various surfaces.

To use Zote as a room deodorizer, you can actually place chunks of the laundry bar in various areas where the scent never seems to improve. Cut a small cube off and tuck it deep into a pair of smelly sneakers. You can also put a piece of it into a corner of a closet that's musty or under the bed. Using Zote like this can work for several reasons. Zote contains citronella essential oil, which gives it a significantly strong scent. As a result, when placed in various hidden spaces, the scent of the laundry soap is likely to mask even the most smelly area of your home.

The clean scent can also freshen up the area you've got it tucked into. As a deodorizer, the compounds in Zote will bind to the odor molecule and help to modify its structure, which means it cannot continue to produce an odor you can smell.

However, before you do this, take a few steps to minimize risks to the health of any pets. While Zote is not considered toxic, it can cause irritation to your pet's digestive system if consumed. As a result, avoid using it like this if you have a pet that could confuse it with a chew toy or food.

While masking the smell of certain odors seems necessary just to get a break from the strong scent, it's not really cleaning them away. You can also use Zote on a range of materials to clean them, breaking the bond between the dirt and the surface and allowing the area to become clean and sanitary again. It works as a stain remover, for example, which means you can use it to remove food and greasy spills from carpeting and other cloth-like materials. To do this, test in a hidden area first to ensure it is colorfast. Then, if there's no damage to the material, rub the bar of Zote onto the stained area, work up the suds for a few minutes, allow it to set for 10 more minutes, and then wipe and rinse the surface. 

You can also use Zote as an alternative to most regular detergents with ease. If you want a spray for the musty interior of a closet you don't use often, grate some of the laundry soap and add to a bottle of clean water. Use this type of cleaning agent to refresh and clean mattresses that may be old and tired. It can also remove odors from things like washable carpet, rugs you have not laundered in some time, or other items you can toss into the washer. Using Zote allows you to pull out a lot of those odors with ease.