Did you know you can use plenty of things in your home for other purposes? Stop wasting and save money with some of these tried and true techniques.
Step 1
Reuse old towels. Instead of buying new washcloths, hand towels, tea towels or dishrags, cut your old, thin and ragged bath towels into hand towels and dish towel-sized pieces. Once the dish towels and hand towels get to the point where they’re better off as dish rags or washcloths, cut up some of the former. When the dish rags and washcloths are too pitiful looking to be used for their intended purpose anymore, they become cleaning rags.
Step 2
Cut, hem and embroider old sheets. They make lovely table doilies, table clothes, table napkins, pillow cases, curtains, neckerchiefs, and handkerchiefs. They can also be used for cleaning rags, car polishing cloths and dust rags. If 100% cotton, they can be boiled, laundered and dried, then folded and ironed for use as emergency medical bandages, sanitary pads, and diapers. What do you think they used in the olden days?
Step 3
Avoid costly laundromats. Clothes can be scrubbed with any suitable or mild detergent or soap in a bathtub, sink, bucket or any large enough container and rinsed thoroughly. Just hang in any dry location, outside is best, inside is fine in winter especially if indoor air is too dry. Free humidifier! A broiler pan from the oven can be used as a scrub board. Lacking that, stomp around in a large plastic tote full of dirty laundry and detergent for a half hour, empty, refill with clean water to rinse, repeat rinse cycle a few times, wring out the clothes and hang them on a clothes line.
Step 4
Save those old, ragged t-shirts. They can either be turned into rags, as mentioned above for towels, or cut & sewn into long strips connecting them into one big ball of “yarn” and crocheted or knitted into heavy afghans, blankets, bedspreads, lap covers, rugs, or clothing, such as hats, scarves, or shawls and ponchos.
Step 5
Gather old scraps of soap and put them in an onion or orange plastic mesh bag, or an old piece of pantyhose or sock. After tying a knot in both ends, use the bound soap scrap bag as an exfoliating body scrubber.
Step 6
Realize that soap, shampoo and body wash are all pretty interchangeable. If you run out of one, use the other, at least temporarily. Run out of soap / shampoo / body wash? They’re all pretty much inter-changeable, just make the necessary (and hopefully temporary) substitution and drive on.
Step 7
Use moistened dryer sheets to clean sinks and showers, instead of buying expensive and potentially ineffective soap scum cleansers. It'll smell great, and one box can last a long time.
Step 8
Cut cakes with floss. Use dental floss to cut cakes horizontally for filling. Just wrap a long piece of dental floss all the way around the cake, cross the ends and pull. No mess, straight cut, very few crumbs.
