Frugal and Lazy

A few weeks ago I made homemade laundry detergent. There are two main reasons I experimented with this. 1) I’m cheap, errrrr… frugal. 2) I’ve been getting more and more sensitive to fragrances. Back when I was 13, I’d layer on the most hideous fragrances and be okay. Then in my late teens/early 20s, I couldn’t handle some fragrances. Now almost everything sets me off in a sneezing fit. The Tide/Downy combination (i.e., the Procter & Gamble double dose effect) is a killer. And I haven’t quite found a laundry detergent that is cost effective, cleans well & doesn’t irritate my respiratory system.


I made the powder version of the homemade laundry detergent. The liquid version involves boiling soap in a stockpot, five gallon containers & lots of stirring. Remember - I'm lazy. What I did was get a bar of fels naptha (soap), a container of WASHING soda, and a container of borax. First, grate the whole bar of fels naptha with a cheese grater. I did this while Julia was playing in the bathtub. Then I mixed it with 1 cup of washing soda and 1 cup of borax. Tada! That's it! Just use a tablespoon with each wash load (or a little more if it's extra dirty). What I do is use a heaping tablespoonful & if it's a really dirty load, I throw in some Oxy Clean as well.

I also found that the Dollar Store carries detergent – 32 loads for $1. That’s not bad and pretty price competitive with the homemade stuff. I haven’t done a detergent-to-detergent direct comparison (ya know, like the laundry commercials do), but it seems like the homemade stuff does a pretty good job and the Dollar Store detergent does an eh job. And the homemade version is definitely less fragrant.

So the jury is still out – but I’ll keep you posted if the homemade version is indeed the bee’s knees because it was super easy to make (and cheap…errrrrrr thrifty!).


Not only am I thrifty, but I am also lazy. I hate washing the car. I’ve owned my car for almost 2 years, and I STILL have not ever washed it. Okay, it’s dirty. It’s so dirty that you can now write “Wash Me!” in the dirt. But, again, I’m cheap and don’t want to take it to a carwash. I also don’t want to lug the hose from behind the basement, hook it up, get the soap and water in a bucket (but yet I’m okay with making homemade laundry detergent…go figure…okay, I’m an inside girl), and wash the car myself. After a downpour yesterday, I had a genius (to me) idea. The car had been sitting outside in the rain, so it was already wet. I ran outside with a rag and wiped down the really bad “wash me worthy” parts of the car. It doesn’t look great by any means, but it’s not quite so bad AND I didn’t use any water (from the city supply), and it was soooo easy to wipe down the car in 5 minutes.


So I’ve told you how I’m cheap (errrr…frugal) and lazy. My confession is that I can’t get into couponing much anymore. We cancelled the newspaper a few months ago (didn’t really read it), and life was hectic. It’s okay because even though I’d clip the coupons, it seemed like they would expire before I used them or it was for a product I was iffy on & couldn’t combine it with a good sale.

There are all these internet coupons nowadays. We don’t have a printer at home. Well, we have a printer, but we don’t have any wet ink for the printers. We don’t really print much, so it’s not worth it to buy ink. All the internet coupons seem to have these coupon downloader things that I’m sure keep track of you for Big Brother. Not that I really care about Big Brother, but our technology department seems to think that coupon downloader thing caused all of my virus problems earlier in the year. Honestly I did start having more and more problems after I installed it. And why put it on my home computer since I can't print? So I can’t really use those internet coupons, except for the ones you load on your shopper’s card.

I still get the weekly ads that list the sales and give some coupons as well. I will continue to do that, but I just don’t think I have it in me for the whole extreme couponing rage. I am subscribed to several extreme couponers and will certainly take advantage of any specials that don’t require a lot of effort in the way of downloading coupons and the like, and I like to see what kind of deals are out there.

My take is that extreme couponing really takes an investment in time initially. You do begin to reap the rewards quickly, but it takes time to get to your “A game” by having the stock of coupons ready to go. I wish all of the extreme couponers the best, and I love hearing the fantastic deals (and will definitely participate if I can in the Catalina deals and such)…I’m just not sure my heart is into the whole she-bang. Laziness wins over frugality.