Thrift Week 2022, Day Five: Make It Yourself

Yesterday's Thrift Week entry was all about doing it yourself. Today's is about a related idea:

Ecofrugal Principle #5: Make It Yourself

While "do it yourself" refers to services, "make it yourself" is about goods. It's what you do any time you decide to make something for yourself — ideally from materials or ingredients you already have at home — rather than buying it in a store.

Brian and I are probably even bigger MIYers (make-it-yourselfers) than we are DIYers. Over the years, we've made countless things at home, both large and small. Some of our more interesting MIY projects were:

• Our brown-paper floor in the downstairs room
• The vanity Brian constructed for the downstairs bath
  
• The two bookcases Brian built for the living room (custom-made to fit over the baseboard heater)
  
• Our Rubbermaid-bin cat box
• Brian's IKEA-hacked sitting/standing desk
• A custom knife-drawer insert
• A cat tree for our two kitties
• A magnet board for my office
• The wooden boxes and attached trellises for our garden beds
  
• Our shipping-pallet compost bin
• A canning rack
• A reusable straw sleeve for transporting drinking straws
• My homemade face wash
• Homemade vegan mozzarella cheese
  
• A travel toothbrush holder
• A soap-dish insert
• Homemade almond milk
  

Obviously, there's some overlap between MIY and DIY. For instance, when Brian bakes a loaf of bread at home, he's MIYing something he could have bought at the store, but he's also DIYing the work of baking it rather than paying a baker to do it. But basically, any time you use your DIY skills to produce a physical object, you can consider it MIY.

Making it yourself can obviously be a money-saver. Pretty much everything on the list above would have been more expensive to buy than it was to make — sometimes a whole lot more expensive. But in most cases, the money isn't the main reason we do it. Instead, our biggest motivations to MIY are:

1. Environmental Benefits. MIY products can be a lot eco-friendlier than store-bought ones. Homemade almond milk and face wash come with no packaging waste. Making products from items we already have on hand, such as scrap wood, saves natural resources. And in many cases (like our compost bin made from pallets pr my straw sleeve made from an old pair of shorts) it keeps items out of the waste stream as well.
2. Custom Design. Often, it's difficult or impossible to find exactly what you want in a store. You have to compromise on the design, the materials, the ingredients, the color, or what have you. But when you make it yourself, you can make it to your own specifications. That was the motive behind nearly all our MIY home products, from the paper floor (which we were able to install directly over the concrete, eliminating the need for a subfloor that would eat up precious vertical space in a low-ceilinged room) to the homemade vegan mozzarella (which tastes better than any store-bought alternative we've tried).
   

Like DIY, MIY doesn't make sense for everything. For instance, neither of us is sufficiently skilled at sewing to make our own clothes (aside from the odd costume piece). The homemade masks we sewed for ourselves early in the pandemic have proved inferior to the ones we can now buy at Rite Aid for five bucks. And despite all my attempts, I have yet to produce a homemade hair conditioner that I'm really satisfied with.

In fact, I wouldn't even go so far as to say you should always try making something first before you give up and go to the store to buy it. In most cases, it's perfectly possible, and much easier, to find what you want on a store shelf. But if you've shopped around and you just aren't finding what you want — or you're finding that what you want comes with a financial or environmental cost that's more than you want to pay — it's always worth giving MIY a try. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it can usually get you a much better product at a much better price. And sometimes, the work of making it actually takes less time, and is a lot more fun, than spending hours on Google Shopping.