How to Deodorize Your Home Naturally

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If you want your house to smell good, you can’t just cover up bad smells, you have to remove them. I think this is a step a lot of people miss. You can only make a litter box room smell so good if you aren’t also cleaning it regularly and eliminating most of the cat box smell in the first place. 

While there are lots of products out there full of chemicals, you may be interested in deodorizing your home naturally, without all the noxious chemicals. If you’re looking for ways to deodorize your home naturally, keep reading for my best tips. Luckily, they’re super easy and mostly incredibly cheap!

Baking soda

Open the windows

Air purifiers

Bamboo charcoal air purifier bags

Good cleaning

Baking soda

First up, baking soda. Lots of people use baking soda to eliminate odors in their fridge. Baking soda can work great as an odor eliminator because it can neutralize acids (since it is a base) causing odors. Baking soda essentially makes a chemistry exchange with the smelly food particles in the air that neutralizes the smell. There was even an interesting study done comparing baking soda to a couple other run-of-the-mill ingredients like charcoal that found baking soda is one of the better odor eliminators .

Baking soda isn’t going to be an end all be all for all smelly odors. But it is great in some key areas. I tend to use baking soda regularly in the fridge, diaper pail, and to clean mattresses, as well as on an as needed basis in other areas that develop a particularly acidic/vinegary smell. Interestingly, you may be using baking soda as an odor eliminator and not even know it if you use odor eliminator pucks in your diaper pail. Most of them are made with baking soda.

Open the windows

This may feel like an odd, cheap suggestion, but it’s one of the best I’ve got. A lot of odors linger in our house because they aren’t able to escape it. If you’re not letting stale air out and fresh air in, the smells in your home will be more likely to stay there. This is why hood vents over the stove suck the air up and out and why places like trash cans (which are closed environments where smells get trapped) tend to smell so bad. 

Simply opening your windows when the weather permits can usher those nasty or unpleasant smells out and let fresh, clean air in. This is also just good for your health, but that’s another topic. 

Air purifiers

While not really meant for eliminating odors and certainly not the most effective, air purifiers will achieve this to some extent. This is because they work to remove particulate matter and VOCs from the air. If those particulates or VOCs are particularly smelly, they may be able to reduce odor by catching them and removing them from the air circulating around your house. 

However, air purifiers are not designed to remove smells and really they would need an extra charcoal filter to do this effectively. Some air purifiers market that they have a charcoal screen to reduce smells. While this may accomplish this somewhat, most of them do not contain enough charcoal to really be effective. Still, they may slightly reduce odors even if they don’t have this charcoal screen.

Bamboo charcoal air purifier bags

Here’s one I didn’t know about before recently: bamboo charcoal bags. These are exactly what they sound like, a breathable, filter bag filled with charcoal made from bamboo, rather than wood. Bamboo is supposed to be more eco-friendly (because it grows like a weed) and its porosity when charcoaled is highly absorbent of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other particulate matter. They basically work by removing particulate matter and VOCs as the air passes through the porous charcoal and emerges free from these compounds, and therefore some nasty smells.

There isn’t abundant research on the capacity of this material to remove odors and VOCs yet, but there is pretty solid preliminary, laboratory research, as well some interesting “at-home” type tests. I may do a future post exploring the research further, but for now it does appear that these bags are a great option for eliminating odors in particularly smelly areas. While they are technically designed for air purification, not odor elimination, they can achieve this in a similar manner to what we discussed under air purifiers, but they are much more effective than that.

I’d recommend throwing these bags in places like a litter box room, the closet, wherever you collect your laundry (even in the hamper, just ensure you remove it before wash time), near the toilet, and in smelly shoes or shoe collection areas.

If you just look this up on Amazon, beware, there’s a lot of weird companies that probably just dropship products and you can’t guarantee anything about the quality of manufacturing, toxicity, and ethics. Moso Natural is one I would buy off Amazon.

Good cleaning

Another cheapie, but really the best way to keep your house from smelling is just to remove anything that would cause a smell. Good housekeeping is always the base of a beautiful, comfortable home, and that applies to scent too. Good places to focus are the kitchen (particularly the sink, fridge, and trash can), the toilet area, laundry, carpets, and mattresses.

I wrote a more thorough post on how to completely clean your home with non-toxic products. But very briefly, here are my favorite methods for keeping these spots clean and fresh while also adding a little bit of scent as well. 

Sink: If you do not have a garbage disposal, just ensure you keep your sink clean and consider squeezing some lemon juice down the drain followed by hot water now and then. However, if you have a garbage disposal, the number one way to keep it clean and freshen it up is just to throw a lemon peel or a spent half lemon in there and turn it on. There is no need for chemicals here. Lemons have antibacterial properties so they will clean it out and grinding up that peel will release that great citrus smell. 

Fridge: Just stick a box or bowl of baking soda in the back of the fridge. But honestly, if you keep the fridge clean and throw out food that goes bad, it shouldn’t tend to smell. 

Trash can: Just keep it clean! Don’t leave it for too long, especially if you have meat packaging in there. Additionally, if you can start a compost pile outside to throw most of your scraps, it will significantly reduce the smell of your trash can. Aside from taking out the trash, I ensure that at least once a week I am wiping down the trash cans inside and out with my ACV or all purpose spray to clean off any food particles that fell onto it, making sure it stays clean and fresh and eliminating odors that can build up over time inside the can.

Toilet: I think a major reason this area can start to smell is the toilet-side trash. So first of all, make sure you’re taking that out regularly. But otherwise, make sure you are cleaning all around and under the toilet, especially if you have little boys. Also consider keeping a natural room spray by the toilet for easy use while you’re already right there. 

Laundry: First of all, do your laundry regularly. But also consider using a hamper with a lid and throwing a bamboo charcoal air purifier bag in there to soak up the smell. A baking soda puck on the inside wall of the hamper can be a great option as well.

Carpets and mattresses: I’m combining them because I treat them very similarly. I do carpets a little more frequently, but you should be cleaning both regularly. You’d be surprised how much of a game changer this can be. With both, sprinkle baking soda over the entire surface (obviously take the bedding off your mattress first…), let sit for a little while if you can, and vacuum away. A bonus for both is if you can let direct sunlight hit them (sunlight is a natural disinfectant and kills germs) and sprinkle/spray some essential oils on them. I just use my natural room spray for this.

Keeping your house odor free naturally does not have to be complicated or even difficult. Cleaning obviously takes a little time, but if you can get in a rhythm of just quick clean ups throughout your week, you’ll have an odor free house before you know it. 

This isn’t the topic of this post, but I recommend creating some kind of weekly or monthly routine for your cleaning as I find that is the only way a lot of people can keep up with it and make it manageable.

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