Laundry. Can’t live with it (smell) can’t live without it (indecent exposure charges). I hate doing laundry so so much, but that isn’t even the point of this post. Oh, and please ignore the plastic coin sleeves on my laundry quarters. Apparently after an eternity of perfectly efficient paper coin wrappers banks decided to make me look like a fraud. Like I wasn’t doing that well enough on my own with plastic everywhere and bad quality phone pictures. Anyway. Laundry.
Laundry soap is kinda expensive if you buy the nice kind that smells really good, and the bottles are deceptively insulated and smaller than they look so you go through it really fast. It’s cray. Also, with new machines needing low-suds high efficiency detergent, one must be Discerning about One’s Laundry Soap.
Luckily this solution is both inexpensive, easy and quick to make, and lasts you (~30 loads), provided you’re a two person household that acts like washing your own clothes is an act of torture. If you’ve got a big family I imagine you could double or quadruple the recipe and keep it in a box or repurposed gallon jug and not have to worry about it too often.
I’ve been using this recipe for about a year now, possibly longer, and it works well, provided you don’t hyper-overload your washer like I tend to do. Because I hate doing laundry. I mentioned that, right? If you overload your washer (I mean REALLY overload, like, try to stuff an extra load’s worth of clothes in…) the soap sometimes gets trapped and doesn’t rinse out all the way. So don’t do that. EDIT: Just to be clear I didn’t create this recipe, but I’ve unfortunately lost the bookmark from whence it came. It’s very common on teh internets and has no doubt been around much much longer than the internet. I didn’t mean to imply it was my creation, but I have no way of finding out whose it was. SO. There is that. Clarifications ‘n stuff.
YOU WILL NEED:
1 bar of castile soap (Dr. Bronner’s is the standby, and castile soap is low suds – totally usable in h.e. machines)
1 cup borax
1 cup baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
OPTIONAL
1-2 teaspoons of your favorite essential oil to make it smell nice, as the soap scent isn’t very strong. I recommend tea tree or lavender, both also have anti-microbial properties.
Sidenote: Internet hearsay has decreed borax Fundamentally Unsafe and Quite Toxic, but like most things is really only harmful if you eat it. Which you shouldn’t. It is a mild skin irritant upon excessive and prolonged contact, however, it does get rinsed out, and I personally have not had a problem. That being said, don’t inhale it, and keep it away from your children and your pets, and if you or anyone in your household is asthmatic this is not the recipe for you.
INSTRUCTIONS:
Grate your bar of soap. It only takes me 3 minutes to do this, but your mileage may vary. It takes forever when Justin does it.
Add baking soda and borax. Stir.
Put in a jar and use 1 tablespoon per load.
Pura vida! (and be grateful for your in-home washer, if you have one. I have to go trudge down to the laundry room and get my towels now -___-)
