Household Hacks: An ecofrugal soap-dish solution

Since the COVID outbreak started, Brian and I (well, mostly Brian) have been washing our hands more regularly and more thoroughly than we used to. As a result, our bar of soap was more or less constantly damp, and left to soak in its own juices in the soap dish, its outer surface rapidly disintegrated into mush. Not only did it look disgusting, a lot of the soap was going to waste, building up as muck on the soap dish rather than actually being used on our hands.

I could have solved this problem by switching to liquid soap, as Millennials have supposedly done, but that approach seemed even more wasteful. Not only does it come in a plastic bottle rather than a simple wrapper, it usually has a non-recyclable pump top that makes it impossible to get all the soap out of the bottle — so we'd end up wasting even more of it. And besides, I knew it was possible to use bar soap without having it all disintegrate in the dish; after all, we'd done it for years before COVID hit. All I had to do was find some way to drain the water off it so it wouldn't stay wet all the time.

Now, there are lots of little soap dish inserts designed for this very purpose, made of everything from silicone to stainless steel. But finding one the right size for our little built-in soap dish posed a difficulty, especially when it isn't possible to go to a store and browse. So I thought about what materials we had available, and I remembered those little mesh tubes that our garlic comes in. Brian always saves these rather than throwing them out, even though the only use we've found for them is improvised cat toys, so he has quite a large collection at this point that isn't being used for anything else. So I simply picked out the three that seemed most snugly rolled up, tucked them into the soap dish, and rested the bar of soap on top of them.

This worked reasonably well. The plastic mesh material allowed the liquid to drain off the soap, so it didn't turn to goop, and it didn't accumulate soap and dirt residue so fast that it quickly became gross-looking itself. Cleaning it once a week, when doing the rest of the bathroom, was sufficient, and reasonably easy to do (just rinse under the tap). The only problem was that the little tubes had a tendency to stick to the soap bar, coming up with it whenever we lifted it to wash with. But I mitigated this problem by stitching the three tubes together, using just a few stitches at each intersection point, with waterproof dental floss rather than thread.

This simple DIY solution seems to work as well as anything we could have bought in a store, it fits our odd-sized soap dish, and it didn't cost us a cent. And, since it used up something that would otherwise just have gone to waste, it's the perfect example of ecofrugality.