Inventory Check - Soap

How much soap do you have? Body/bath, hand, dish, laundry, house, etc.... take a look through your home and your stored supplies. Do you have enough if can't buy more for a year? Do you know what you would do if you ran out?

What about if you didn't have running water or electricity to use that soap? Have you figured out an alternative to getting clean? (We're storing baby wipes.) What about cleaning your dishes and clothes - do you have alternative methods for cleaning those? And your house....We recently came across a dishwasher that doesn't use electricity and is mounted to your faucet.... but we couldn't use that if we didn't have well water and enough force to get the water up and through.

For cleaning clothes, we bought a wonder-washer - it's just a small barrell that has a handle to turn it. It doesn't take a lot of clothes at a time, but certainly works very well.

Most things can be cleaned well with vinegar and baking soda. And once you run out of baking soda, vinegar does well by itself. Plant an apple tree now, and as soon as you have apples, experiment with making your own apple cider vinegar. Good for cooking and cleaning.

We have also bought soapwort seeds to sow at our next place. We've discovered it can make shampoo and body soap and even help clean the home and clothes.

Have you come up with alternatives to various soaps?

3 comments:

Chili said...

My mother recently purchased a bag of homemade soap at an auction and it spurred a dicussion on using that soap. It was made 100 years ago, and my mom and dad (in their 70's) shared stories of how that soap was all they used - for everything! Hygeine, washing clothes and dishes, scrubbing floors - anything that required "soap" got the lye soap. They shaved it for the laundry and dishes, and kept it chunked for showers. Needless to say, I'd like to think I'm stocked up with soap -- she bought about 30 pounds of it!

Anonymous said...

A while back I bought an old fashioned dust mop for the hard wood floors, a hand push carpet sweeper, and a collapsible clothes drying rack to use in the winter time when an outdoor clothes line woundn't work. Many of these items can be found at Lehams or Fuller Brush.

To make vinegar a person meeds a starter which is called a Mother. I bought my red wine vinegar mother and a cider vinegar mother at a shop that sells beer and wine brewing supplies.

ThrtnWmsFam said...

Chili: love it! know where we can get some in the Denver, CO area?

Anonymous: that's a good idea. We are getting away from automated/electrical cleaning appliances, including clothes-lines that I use most of the time now anyway. I've started using vinegar and baking soda to do some cleaning, and turns out vinegar is pretty anti-bacterial and does a great job! Thanks for the info. Will probably post recipes for making apple cider vinegar next Fall around apple harvest time.

Thanks! Vikki