3 ingredient D-I-Y Laundry Detergent (no boiling or grating!)

In an attempt to find easy ways to save money, I began looking online for ways to make my own laundry detergent. Many DIY laundry detergent recipes call for grating soap or boiling water.  

Some recipes make 10 gallons at once. I didn't want to DIY our laundry detergent and end up with 10 gallons because what if we didn't like the soap and then were stuck with 10 gallons!?  

Finally I found this recipe for laundry detergent.  It only takes 3 ingredients and has just 4 steps, this laundry soap was right up my alley!  

3 ingredients, 4 steps, 5 minutes.  People, it doesn't get any easier than that!

DIY Laundry Detergent Ingredients:

• Washing Soda
• Borax
• Dawn Dish Soap (Blue original)

DIY Laundry Detergent Instructions:

• Get an empty gallon jug
• Put in 3 T. washing soda, 3T. borax, and 2 T Dawn
• Pour in 4C hot water
• Once your laundry soap mixture is cool, top off the jug with cold water. Bubbles will overflow, that's okay.  Once bubbling stops, put cap on your new gallon jug of laundry soap and give yourself a high-five!

DIY Laundry Detergent Cost:

• Dawn soap-$2.64 at Walmart (I already had this on hand because it's also what we use to do dishes)
• Borax-$4.47 at Walmart
• Washing Soda-$4.12 at Walmart
• Gallon jug-Free, wash out a gallon of water or some other jug you already have around the house.

Total cost of your 3 ingredient laundry detergent:

$11.23

I can get at least 10 more gallons of this simple laundry detergent out of these supplies. Which means 11 gallons of laundry detergent for $11.23 total. 

Where else can you buy a gallon of laundry soap for $1.02?!?

Cost Comparison Tide Vs. DIY Laundry Detergent:

For 11 gallons of our 3 Ingredient Laundry Soap it costs $11.23 for 1,408 ounces. Price per ounce: 0.00797. 

I found this Tide at Walmart for $11.97 for 92 ounces. Since there are 128 ounces in a galloon, I would have to buy 15.03 bottles of this Tide to have the same 11 gallons of laundry soap. Rounding down to 15 bottles of Tide the cost would be  (15x11.97)= $179.55 (0.127 per ounce)

179.55 vs. $11.23

Making my own laundry detergent saves $168.32.  THAT is a huge savings!  Is DIY-ing my laundry soap, spending 5 minutes per gallon (55 minutes total for 11 gallons if we do it one gallon at a time) worth $168?!  YES.  I don't make $168 an hour so spending an hour of time to essentially "earn" that much money is definitely worth it.

But what if I buy less expensive laundry detergent? Should I still make my own?

YES! The least expensive brand I can find at Walmart is "Xtra" which costs 0.04/ounce which is $56.32 for 11 gallons. Versus $11.23 by making it yourself.  Your savings is $45.09 for 55 minutes of work!  Again, I don't make $45 an hour so it is STILL a huge savings to make my own laundry detergent.  Not having to boil or grate anything means this is the easiest laundry detergent recipe I've seen!

Fabric softener aka my kryptonite

I love my Downy liquid fabric softener.  You will pry it from my cold dead hands unless you have a fabulous copycat DIY recipe.  If you know how to make Downy at home, hit me up!  Otherwise that's a laundry product I'll keep buying at the store.

Friday Funnies (Halloween Costumes)

Update:
Wow, more than 4,000 of you have viewed this post!  Thank you so much for your shares and pins.  :)  Glad to see everyone loving these costumes, Google Maps seems to be the most shared!

With Halloween around the corner, I thought that today was the perfect day for sharing some funny costumes I've seen around the web:

mouse trap costume (source)

Google Maps Costume (source)

This E.T. costume was cracking me up:

E.T. Bike Costume (source)

$0 Pantry Organization

I reorganized our pantry.
And didn't spend any money.

You can look in magazines and blogs and pinterest (oooh pinterest) and find incredible, gorgeous pantry spaces.  Pantry makeovers.  Gorgeous, drool-worthy paint jobs on the inside, full of matching glass containers and baskets and cute chalkboard labels.

This pantry has none of that.

This is the pantry re-do for the cheapskate/tightwad/broke/whateveryouwanttocallit.

So if you don't have a dollar to spend but want to tidy up the pantry, this is for you!

Here is what we were dealing with before.

Brace yourselves....

My mom came over to help me out one day and we set to work.

First, taking everything out.  Look at that MESS on the counter!



I threw out the old stuff, the stale boxes of cereal, and all that jazz.

Then I organized like items.  These blue rectangle boxes I already had.  Mom had bought them for me on clearance a few years ago.

The clothespins I had (hint the dollar store had a bag of them) and the blue paper was just something I grabbed from my scrapbooking stash.  Someday I'll make prettier labels but these are functional and got the job done.

My categories are:

• Canned goods (2 boxes)
• Snacks (Goldfish crackers, popcorn, granola bars)
• Bags and Foils
• Baking (candy molds, icing, baking mix pouches, sprinkles)

I brought in this basket from another room since it was the perfect size to hold my mix pouches. 

The white lid containers behind it hold

• flour
• powdered sugar
• regular sugar

The small glass jar I had leftover from my little guy's first birthday party.  I tossed the stale candy that was inside and discovered it was the perfect size for those little Crystal Light drink mixes for bottled water.

Cereal boxes (that survived the great purge) went on the top shelf, along with oats and a few misc boxes (you can see a rice mix and instant potatoes up there).

And the great, zero cost, after:

Sharing the transformation at these linky parties: Organizing With Sandy, Crafts Keep Me Sane, Keeping The Home, Everything but the Kitchen Sink, Serenity Now, A Bowl Full of Lemons, Thrifty Thursday, Organizing Made Fun

One hundred and ten bunnies

Remember my big stack of cut out peeps bunnies?

Here is what they looked like all laid out getting ready to cut. And the baby trying to investigate.

I've been putting some of them to work making Easter garland for my house!

Cute, right? You might remember I had made a peeps garland before just hand sewing. This time I used my machine and it was a lot easier!

I ambitiously hoped to use all 110 bunnies to make garland for every single window and mirror in my house.

Someone should have slapped me silly! I don't have time for doing that many!

  

Linking up at these fine blogs:

Someday Crafts

A Little Knick Knack