All kinds of DIY recipes are making the rounds on Pinterest these days. I'm not talking about food recipes, I'm talking about instructions for household items that you just always assumed you were supposed to buy at the store: laundry detergent, soap, stain removers, body wash ... you know, various cleansing agents.
Like a lot of ideas on Pinterest, these tutorials have a sort of OMG I can't believe I never thought of that quality. And there's a pinch of You'd be crazy not to do this! thrown in there, too.
You can make gallons of laundry detergent for a quarter! I made seven containers of body wash with one bar of soap! You can, too! Doooooo itttttttt.
I'm leery of DIY projects because I often think they fall into the category of Penny Wise and Pound Foolish. Take, for example, the time I endeavored to sew curtains at our old house. We had just moved and I didn't have a job yet, and I had a brand-new sewing machine, so I figured why not be thrifty and make curtains? (The fact that I can't really sew is beside the point.) So, I got the pattern for curtains, and the fabric, and the 18 or so other items needed to make curtains ... and it all cost $180. Bill made me embarrassingly crawl back into the store and return it all, and then we went over to Target and bought curtains for $30.
So, I wasn't eager to jump on the whole DIY bandwagon. It just seems like a lot of effort to save a little money, or, as with the case of the curtains, a lot of effort and a net cost over store-bought. And with a most of these projects, you will only save money if you make the item several times. For example, if you buy $15 worth of ingredients to make bread and you only make one loaf, you didn't save any money over buying a $2 loaf of bread at the store. You'd have to make at least 8 loaves of bread to make the per-loaf cost of homemade bread an actual money-saver.
Therefore, my general rule is that in most cases it's better to stick with store-bought items and focus on where you can buy them the cheapest.
However, I admit to being intrigued by the idea of making your own hand soap. Hand soap is one of those products that just seems to disappear in my house. I don't know if it's because we're obsessive hand-washing germophobes, or we have to pee and then wash up more often than the average family, or if (and this is my real suspicion) Bill is actually using vast quantities of hand soap in some kind of secret science experiment--but the bottom line is that we always seem to be out of hand soap. And it isn't just the cost of hand soap that gets me down--because truthfully you can buy it pretty cheaply at Costco or in the generic Target brand--it's the general hassle of always needing to buy hand soap. No matter how often I buy hand soap, it seems like there's never any in the house, and so we're scrambling around playing musical hand soaps and switching the empty pumper by the kitchen sink for the full pumper from the lower-traffic bathroom It's one of those marital situations that just always makes you feel annoyed and slighted. You've just finished going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and OMG where did the soap go?
So, I figured that assuming DIY was cheaper or at least a wash (no pun intended) versus storebought soap, making handsoap would be beneficial in terms of time- and hassle-saving.
(Oh, and since the issue of How much is your time worth? tends to come up in these situations, let me remind you that I currently have no paying work.)
So, I made soap.
There are a number of homemade soap recipes on the Internet, though basically they all rely on grating up a bar of soap and adding glycerin and water. What threw me tremendously was how much these recipes varied in terms of the ratio of water and soap to add. I'm not a scientist, but I find it hard to believe that 4 cups of water vs. 10 cups of water, when added to the same quantity of soap, are going to yield a finished product of even remotely the same consistency.
I mention this discrepancy between recipes because the first recipe I followed yielded a product that was way too watery. It was basically soapy water. But since I needed to financially justify the purchase of the glycerin, I kept plugging away at the soap-making effort.
(Side note on the glycerin here: The Internets assured me that they sell glycerin behind the pharmacy counter at Target. The pharmacist at my Target, though, said they had never stocked liquid glycerin behind the counter, and that they only sell it in suppository form. I have no idea what ailment glycerin suppositories are intended to cure, but I was pretty sure they wouldn't work for making soap. So then I went over to the pharmacy at the grocery store, where the guy again asked "liquid or suppository?" and then made a bit of an effort to dig the stuff up for me. So I was aghast that a tiny bottle cost $10, but at that point I felt like I owed it to this guy to purchase the stuff. That and I didn't feel like trying any more stores in my search for glycerin. All of this is to say that I did not get a good deal on glycerin. Apparently you can get it for waaaaaay cheaper than I did.)
With one failed soap-making effort behind me, I went to Target and purchased a 3-pack of Ivory for $1.15. Each bar was 3.3 oz, and I got about 3 cups of grated soap shreds out of that:
At that point you need to let the mixture sit overnight, which is where the whole hassle-elimination issue comes into question.
I woke up the next morning, dismayed to find that my soap had not appeared to gel in the slightest, and instead still looked like a pan of liquid.
BUT! When I went to dip my finger in the liquid, I realized it was actually solid and rubbery! Here is a photo where I use the Dennison's Chili "you can stick a fork in it" trick to demonstrate the solidness of my soap batch:
Next I whizzed the stuff up in a blender. This blender shot is blurry, but you know what a blender looks like:
Et voila! Homemade liquid hand soap! I poured the soap in an old Softsoap container. Here's a photo demonstrating how much soap I ended up with:
It's definitely not the multiple gallons of soap that some of the online recipes promised.
Here's how it all breaks down:
Now, as I said, the bottle of glycerin cost $10. I calculated that I could make 12 batches of soap with that one bottle. So let's round that to about $1 worth of glycerin per batch, because it makes the math easier, and because you never quite get that last little bit of anything out of the container anyway. Also, sales tax.
The soap was about 50 cents a bar when you account for sales tax. So, soap + glycerin cost me $1.50 per batch of soap.
Now, the Target brand Up and Up soap refill of the same size costs $4. And technically since my batch only filled like 3/4 of the bottle, it would actually have cost me $2 to fill the bottle. Plus it's not like the water I used is totally free, nor was the electricity needed to boil the water and run the blender.
What I'm trying to say is AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! What I'm also trying to say is, it's hard to determine how much, if any, money you saving doing it yourself. As I said, I'm still in the hole for the glycerin until I make several more batches. My best guess is that you save $2 per batch with DIY, but not until you make at least 5 batches to cover the cost of the $10 glycerin, except you also have to then buy more soap, and it all becomes like one of those complicated algebra problems that start with "If a train leaves Chicago ..."
(Side note just to make myself a little crazier: I had a $1 off coupon I could have used on the Target brand soap. But since it worked for any Up and Up product, it wasn't a total loss because I got $1 off a body wash instead. Was that body wash cheaper per ounce than the Suave kind, which I also had a coupon for? Who knows? And now I've brought body wash into this.)
But regardless, we're now looking at a situation where I have maybe saved us ... what? Ten dollars in six months? And I mean I know every little bit helps, and it all adds up. True. But also? No.
My husband has already mocked me tremendously for the whole soap-making thing. I mean tremendously. He is decidedly anti-DIY. He's even gone so far as to say my soap is not real soap, and we'll have to buy more soap to use in addition to the "soap" I made. I suspect my home brew soap doesn't work in the secret hand soap experiments he's conducting.
But since I bought the glycerin-that-is-apparently-laced-with-gold, I'm committed to a few more batches of homemade hand soap. So I've decided to look for more benefits of DIY, since the annual $20 savings isn't really selling me on the whole thing:
1. As I said before, there isn't the hassle of going to the store for hand soap anymore. And there isn't the problem of being out of hand soap at any given time.
2. Fewer trips to the store to buy hand soap means fewer random side expenditures that happen whenever you are in a store. Like, I came to Target for hand soap, but now that I'm here I realize we're also out of laundry detergent, Ziplocs, and glass cleaner. Oh, and look at these cute shoes!
3. I can reuse the same plastic soap bottle over and over again, which means less packaging. Better for the environment!
4. Ivory soap smells really good, and I like how DIY soapmaking has a side air-freshening benefit.
5. You know exactly what chemicals you're using with DIY. (But on the other hand the whole process does start with a commercial bar of soap. But it's Ivory, right? 99.44% pure? What's in that 0.06% though?)
6. Making my own soap gave me something to blog about.
So, this concludes my adventures in frugality for today. Join me for the next installment of this series, which will probably be "I just decided to break down and get a job instead of finding 1,000 insignificant ways to save money."
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