Earth Week Challenge 2020: Spring Clean Saturday

Saturday's challenge for Earth Week is the second one that's been revised to make it quarantine-friendly. It was originally meant to be "Shop Green Saturday," about supporting local businesses with your shopping dollars — something I only wish I could do right now. (I did the best I could by ordering online from the businesses that had Web stores, but there's only so many things I can usefully purchase that way.) Since visiting most local businesses is out, the challenge has been rebranded as "Spring Clean Saturday": "Spring clean your home with sustainability in mind. Find ways you can green and simplify your home and purchases for the future."

On one level, this isn't much of a challenge for me, because I do practically all my cleaning with a rag and a spray bottle of vinegar and water. The only commercial cleaning products Brian and I buy regularly are dish soap, laundry detergent, and oxygen bleach (which I use not for laundry but to clean the toilet, since our flushable walnut cat litter has a tendency to stain the porcelain). The challenging part, for me, would be finding the time to do a genuine, thorough "spring cleaning." In theory, I should be able to take advantage of all this "extra time" we supposedly have as a result of being home all the time, but somehow mine has never materialized. Even though I no longer spend five hours a week recruiting volunteers for the Troubadour or three hours a week traveling to and participating in Morris dance practice, the time has all been eaten up by a combination of other projects (like trying to organize two RPGs over Zoom), frantic news-reading to keep up with the latest COVID developments, and sheer psychological exhaustion.

So cleaning my entire house from top to bottom was definitely not on the agenda. But I happened to have one cleaning task on my list aside from the weekly sweeping and bathroom cleanups: cleaning the stemware rack in the kitchen. This was one of my favorite birthday presents from Brian, but it has one problem: situated as it is near the stove, it tends to accumulate a grimy film of oil and dust, and because the top of it is over my head, I don't usually see it and remember to clean it. So I only notice it when I happen to touch the surface, as I did yesterday, and go, "Ick!"

This was a job my usual vinegar-and-water mix definitely couldn't handle, so I pulled out another green cleaning product from our collection that doesn't get used as often: Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day, an all-purpose spray that comes in a variety of scents. We bought this to clean the painted walls next to the stove, which also tend to accumulate oil spatter, and it did just okay at that job; however, on the wood of the stemware rack, it fared much better. Simply spraying it on and wiping it off was all it took, as you can see in this picture. (The right side has been wiped, the left has not.) It was so easy, I went ahead and cleaned off the top of the microwave and the range hood as well while I was at it.

So that's my spring-cleaning task for today. Maybe I'll get around to tackling the rest of the house when I have fewer other things to worry about.

Household Hacks: 7 easy household hacks for the bathroom

Brian and I have a disagreement about the word "hack"—specifically, its use to mean a handy shortcut for everyday life. Brian objects to it on the ground that it's overused, sometimes even in contexts where it really doesn't apply at all (such as these kitchen tips from XKCD.) But personally, I like it. To me, it conjures up images of Alexander cutting through the Gordian knot—a quick, direct solution to a complicated problem. Even the shortness of the word feels appropriate for a short, simple workaround.

Over the past few months, I've noticed that we seem to have come up with a lot of household hacks specifically for use in the bathroom. Some are for cleaning, some for grooming, and some for repairs, but all of them are specifically bath-related. So I thought I'd sum them all up in one post, as a sort of tribute to the Spirit of Hacking.

Hack #1: Clean hair from the sink drain with a plastic bag tie
Every so often, the drain in our sink gets a little sluggish. That's a sure sign that it's clogged up with hair (and usually bits of nasty grime that are clinging to the hair), and it won't run smoothly again until it's cleaned. We have a special tool for this purpose, known as a Zip-It: a long, flexible plastic shaft with little barbs on both sides. You feed this thing carefully down into the drain, and the barbs catch on the hairs so you can pull them back out. The Zip-It emerges from the drain trailing long strands of hair and associated gunk like seaweed off a lobster trap, which is disgusting, but effective.

The Zip-It is only $2.50 at Home Depot, and it's both easier and safer than those vile chemical drain cleaners, which eat through the hair with caustic chemicals that can damage your plumbing (and possibly you, if you splash any on yourself). But if you don't happen to have one on hand when a clog pops up, you can achieve similar results with a plastic garbage bag tie (the kind with rows of little jagged teeth on it, like this). Feed it down into the drain, and you can pull up the hairs from the top few inches of the pipe. It won't penetrate the pipe as deeply as the Zip-It, but it's easy to do, and it should clear away enough of the clog to get the drain running again.

Hack #2: Clean the tub with a dish wand
I used to drive myself crazy trying to get our bathtub clean. My go-to ecofrugal cleaners, vinegar and baking soda, seemed to have no impact at all on the film that clung to the base of the tub. I moved on to various commercial cleaners, including sprays, liquids, and powders; I experimented with different tools, going at the scum with a rag, a sponge, a scrubby pad, a brush, and even a special "shower scrubber" tool with an extendable handle and pivoting head, designed specifically for cleaning the tub from a standing position. (This was worse than useless, as every time I put any real pressure behind it, the head would just flip over.) No matter what I used or how vigorously I scrubbed, I could never get the tub completely clean. All I had to do was scrape my fingernails along the edge, and they'd come away with that whitish film under them.

I turned for help to my pals at the Dollar Stretcher forums. One of them enthusiastically recommended "Ajax grapefruit scented dish soap," applied with a long-handled brush while the tub and tiles are wet, and another suggested a mixture of Palmolive and sudsy ammonia in a spray bottle. Not having either of those brands on hand, I decided to try grabbing an old dish-scrubbing wand filled with generic dish soap and applying that to the wet tub right after my shower. This worked much better than anything else I'd tried. At first, I followed up with a vinegar-and-water spray to rinse all the soap residue off, but eventually I got the idea to add equal parts dish soap and vinegar to the scrubbing brush and apply everything all in one go, then rinse it off.

This is now my regular weekly routine for cleaning the tub. I keep the dishwand hanging at the ready on the towel bar, so once a week, I can just grab it right after I turn off the shower and give everything a quick scrub before rinsing it. That way I don't have to mess around getting into grubby clothes specially for cleaning. I have since seen blog posts saying this vinegar-and-dish-soap concoction works in spray form as well, which might be even easier...but since it took me so long to find a method that worked, I'm not inclined to mess with it.

Hack #3: Remove stains from porcelain with oxygen laundry booster
A few years ago, we switched to a walnut-based cat litter from Blue Buffalo. In most ways, we love it: it clumps firmly, doesn't track as much as the wheat stuff, and controls odor so well that we have never had to change the litter once since we started using it. We just keep scooping out the clumps and adding more litter, and the box keeps not stinking. This makes it a much better value than any other brand we've tried, despite its high cost per pound, because none of it goes to waste.

There's only one problem with it: the walnut fragments tend to leave a darkish stain on the inside of the toilet bowl. My usual cleaning method—vinegar-water spray and a quick scrub with the brush—had no effect. Once again, I tried upgrading to stronger cleaners, including some with chlorine bleach, but to no avail. Brian tried going at the stains with steel wool and was able to get them out temporarily—but that just ended up scratching the porcelain, so fresh stains soaked in faster than ever.

So when I got a coupon for a free carton of OxiClean, I figured it couldn't hurt to try that too. Cleaning bathrooms wasn't one of the listed uses for this product, so my hopes weren't high. But to my amazement, after I'd sprinkled it on and let it sit for a while before brushing and flushing, the stains had faded to near-invisibility. I now repeat this routine once a week, and the porcelain remains in a state of near-pristine whiteness. And I've discovered, after some experimentation, that cheaper brands of oxygen-based laundry booster, such as All, do the job just as well.

Hack #4: Strop your razor on your forearm to maintain its edge
I've mentioned this hack before in my Saving on Shaving post. As this post at Tools for Woodworking explains, stropping a blade isn't quite the same thing as sharpening it on a stone; it's more like smoothing a surface with sandpaper, gently abrading away nicks and scratches. I've seen tips on how to prolong the life of your razor blade by stropping it on a leather belt, a leather-soled shoe, or even an old pair of blue jeans—but the simplest method of all is this one, which I discovered on LifeHacker. You simply give the blade several backwards strokes against the bottom of your own forearm, which you can do right in the shower before you shave.

This method, combined with regular drying and lubrication of the blade, worked well enough for me to keep the cartridges on my old Rite Aid razor going for months on end. Sadly, that razor gave up the ghost last year, and I've yet to find a really satisfactory replacement. I tried samples from both Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, and their fancy four-or-five-blade razors just didn't give me as smooth a shave as my old, obsolete three-blade razor (not to mention that the one from Harry's literally fell apart on its third use). So for now, I'm using an el cheapo MicroTouch razor, which claims to be able to go a month on a single blade without any special interventions. I'm continuing to dry and hone the blade regularly, and while I can't exactly claim to be impressed with the results it's giving me, it is at least holding up pretty well.

Hack #5: Fix a running toilet with a drinking straw
I discovered this trick back in 2013, when we had a problem with our toilet. Basically, the flapper kept getting stuck open because the chain would either get stuck underneath it or snag on it so it couldn't close. Shortening the chain didn't work (it ended up too short, so the flapper couldn't close at all), so I adopted a trick from Wikihow: I detached the chain, fed it through a soda straw, and reattached it. This worked only partially; the rigid chain-and-straw unit was now forcing the flapper closed too quickly, before the bowl had fully filled. So Brian adapted the hack by cutting the straw in half at the middle, allowing the chain to bend. This fix worked so well that even after we eventually replaced the flapper, we reinstated the straw on the chain to keep it from snagging again.

Hack #6: Adapt your toothbrush holder with coat hanger wire 
Brian devised this toothbrush hack back in 2014, when I was trying a new brand of toothbrush that wouldn't fit in our old-fashioned toothbrush holder. This toothbrush holder dates from a simpler time when all toothbrushes had straight, smooth handles, and today's chunky, molded hand-grips just won't fit through the holes. And since it's built into the wall, replacing it isn't really an option, and leaving it unused seems like a waste.

So I hit on the idea that the way to make the toothbrush fit in the holder would be to add on some kind of construct that would allow it to slide in from the side. After a little trial and error, Brian managed to achieve this by bending a piece of coat-hander wire to make a loop that would fit around the handle, then threading the ends of it through the hole in the front, under the bottom, and out on the other side. As built, this dingus can only accommodate one bulky toothbrush, but you could modify it to add a second loop on the other side if you wanted to hold two at once. Or you could just run a second set of wires through a different hole.

Hack #7: Fix a trash can that won't close with a felt pad
Ever since we adopted our two mischievous kitties back in 2015, we've kept finding new things around the house that need to be cat-proofed. Our cat-safe vase is the most notable example, but we've also had to replace a couple of wastebaskets because the cats would either chew on the wicker basket itself or fish things out of it. The worst culprit was the bathroom wastebasket, which contained enticing strands of dental floss that the cats viewed as wonderful toys. We, on the other hand, viewed them as potential garottes for unsuspecting feline throats, and we were determined to keep them out of the kitties' paws. So we bought a small covered waste bin, the kind with a lid that you can open by stepping on a pedal.

This sort of worked, but there was a problem: sometimes the lid would get stuck in the open position, allowing the kitties to go Dumpster diving for dental floss. We tried shimming the can up in the back so it would naturally tilt forward and force the lid closed when you weren't actively stepping on the pedal, but that didn't seem to be enough. So Brian tackled the problem from the other direction; instead of forcing the lid down, he decided to force the foot pedal up.

His repair is simplicity itself. He cut a couple of strips from a felt pad, the kind you put on the bottoms of chair legs to keep them from scratching the floor, and stuck them to the lip of the trash can underneath the pedal. Now, when you step on the pedal, it lowers enough to open the lid, but it doesn't go all the way to the floor, and as soon as you remove your foot, it pops back up again, closing the lid.

This hack went through a couple of iterations before he got it to work. First he tried one layer of felt, but that wasn't enough to push the pedal back up, so he had to add a second layer on top. And he initially tried sticking the felt pads on with just their own adhesive, but they didn't stay put, so he ended up pulling out the big guns and sticking them on with epoxy. Now those pads aren't going anywhere, and those kitties aren't getting their paws on any more dental floss.


So there you are: seven simple hacks for the smallest room in the house. If you know of any more ecofrugal hacks for the bathroom that you think deserve a wider audience, please feel free to share them below; I'm always looking for more ideas.

Savings Challenge, Weeks 19-20: Clean and pretty

Once again, the Bankrate 52-week savings challenge has served up two challenges in a row that are already quite familiar to me. The first one deals with DIY cleaning products, the second with DIY hair care—two things that I've been doing for years. But, for the sake of argument, let's go through them:

Week 19: Make your own cleaning products

The Bankrate reporter who tried this challenge, Laura Dunn, decided to try homemade versions of three specific cleaning products: laundry booster, oven cleaner, and carpet stain remover. This struck me as a bit odd, since these are three products that I use very seldom, if at all. It seemed to me that the best way to save money on cleaning products would be to try a DIY version of an all-purpose cleaner that you use every day.

Her choice might still make sense if Laura Dunn uses these products a lot more often than I do, but based on her experience with the laundry booster, it appears that this was a product she'd actually never tried before. Basically, she just took a friend's advice to add vinegar to the wash cycle when doing laundry to "kill any bacteria" that could be causing "the smell you may have detected in your towels." Dunn was impressed with the result, because her towels came out "very fresh-smelling" and "decidedly softer than usual"—and at $2.48 per gallon, she figures the vinegar costs her only 4 cents per load. Which is all very well, but it's still an extra 4 cents per load, not a savings. Dunn tries to argue that this trick is actually saving her money by extending the life of her towels; in fact, she goes so far as to suppose that the vinegar treatment is actually doubling their lifespan, thus saving her $150 on a set of towels every five years—but she gives no reason at all for this supposition, and no one who commented on the article offered any evidence to back up the claim. Given that I have towels I've been using for 15 years and I've never added vinegar to the rinse cycle, I'm a little skeptical. (I also can't honestly say that I've ever found my towels to smell bad when they've just been washed, so it would make no sense for me to spend an extra 4 cents per load to deal with a complete non-problem.)

The other two DIY products Dunn tried were even less successful. The DIY oven cleaner, a paste of baking soda and water, worked fine, but Dunn calculated that it cost about 56 cents per use, while a bottle of Easy-Off costs maybe 50 cents per use. She thought this was only a worthwhile tip for people who prefer eco-friendly products. Personally, I'd say that baking soda has one other advantage: it's something most of us always have in the house. So if you decide after a cooking debacle that you really need to clean that oven, you don't have to run out and buy a bottle of a product that can only do one job and will probably take years to use up. (We've owned this house for seven years, and I don't think we've cleaned the oven more than once—and it doesn't look particularly dirty inside.)

As for the DIY carpet cleaner, made from a mixture of dish soap, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide, it ended up bleaching Dunn's carpet, and she had to buy a commercial stain remover to undo the damage—which, she notes, cost less than the homemade stuff. Personally, I wouldn't use anything with hydrogen peroxide on any kind of fabric unless it was already solid white—but then, I also wouldn't try this recipe in the first place, since our house doesn't have any carpets. We have a few area rugs, but we've never yet had to remove a stain from one, so there's really no way we could save much money with a DIY carpet cleaner.

So on the whole, Dunn's success rate with DIY cleaners was pretty unimpressive and unlikely to inspire her readers to try them. Which is a pity, because if she'd tried DIY versions of common, everyday cleaners—like good old vinegar and water—she could probably have achieved some much more impressive savings. I use this old standby on practically everything—bathroom, kitchen, floors, windows—and I haven't bought any sort of commercial surface cleaner in years. It's not tough enough for scrubbing the tub, but I do that with a "dish wand" dispenser filled with a mixture of half dish soap and half vinegar, and it works better than any commercial product I've tried. And for anything vinegar can't handle, there's baking soda.

The one thing I can't seem to do with either vinegar or baking soda, or a combination of the two, is removing the faint brown stain our walnut cat litter has left on the inside of our white toilet bowl. I may eventually have to resort to nasty, toxic chlorine bleach for that one.

Week 20: Be your own hairstylist

Bankrate reporter Crissinda Ponder says it costs her $60-$70 to have her hair straightened and styled, and keeping it that way all the time would mean shelling out that amount every other week. So she cut her salon visits back to "a handful" per year with the help of tutorial videos from YouTube. She embeds one such video that shows how to create "super cute summer curls," and the results certainly are as advertised, but alas, it's specifically for African-kinky hair, so it won't work for me.

Now, I can't really say how much I save each year by styling my own hair, because it's been so many years since anyone else did it for me. The last time I had a professional haircut, I think, was when my sister treated me to a session with her posh Boston stylist as a wedding present. I came out of the salon feeling not at all like myself, and I ended up stopping in the restroom and sprinkling water on my blown-out curls to bring them back to normal.

After that, I came to the resolution that I wasn't going to bother with professional hair care anymore. I had never, not once in my life, come out of a hair salon feeling like I looked better than when I went in, and my recent experience had convinced me that going to a pricier salon wouldn't make any difference in that regard. If I just trimmed my own hair at home, maybe it would never look really great, but at least I wouldn't have to pay someone to make me less happy with it.

After several years of trial and error, I now have a simple routine that I'm pretty happy with. It's basically a simplified version of the Curly Girl Method: I wet my hair thoroughly in the shower, then wrap it in a microfiber towel to soak up excess moisture while I do my exercises, and then I comb in some plain old VO5 conditioner and let it air dry. Once it's completely dry, I can fluff the curls up to an appropriate volume. And when then look like they're getting too long or too uneven, I just trim a bit off here or there until it looks right. The results may not look "professional"—but I'm happier with them than I've ever been with a professional cut.


So that's two more challenges that pose no real challenge for me. Perhaps next week's, which has to do with meal replacement shakes, will prove more interesting.

Frugal heresy

The latest issue of the Dollar Stretcher newsletter featured an article called, "10 Things You Can Stop Buying at the Grocery Store." The author, Carol Channon, claims that you shouldn't need to buy any of these items because, for most of them, it's cheaper and healthier to make them from scratch. Now, this is such a standard piece of advice for newcomers to the frugal life that it has almost taken on the status of a Frugal Commandment—"Thou shalt cook from scratch"—and it seems almost like heresy to contradict it. And I do, in fact, think that this is sound advice in most cases, and I frequently repeat it myself. But looking carefully at this particular article, it seems that Channon has managed in the space of a fairly short list to come up with several items that I consider exceptions to this basic rule. Moreover, she doesn't seem to have even attempted to do the math to calculate whether her money-saving advice really will save you money on these ten items. So at the risk of being branded a frugal heretic, I'd like to look at the ten items on her list, one by one, and discuss the actual numbers before coming to any conclusions about whether we should all strike these items from our grocery lists.

1. Packaged meat. Channon argues that it's much better to buy a whole chicken and cook it yourself, because it makes an easy meal and leaves you a carcass to make stock from. The problem is, a whole chicken costs more per pound than a package of drumsticks. We routinely buy free-range, organic chicken legs from Trader Joe's for $1.99 a pound; a whole organic, free-range chicken, according to this Trader Joe's flyer, cost $2.49 per pound on sale more than a year ago, so the regular price is presumably at least $3 a pound. So while a roast chicken may feel like more of a special-occasion meal than baked chicken drumsticks or thighs, it will also cost more.

As for beef and pork, Channon says you save more money by buying in bulk—by the side, or even a whole animal to be butchered—than buying packages. We don't normally buy these meats, so I'll have to turn for guidance here to Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!), who wrote in her third Tightwad Gazette book that the cost of beef sold by the side "is less than the regular supermarket price for the same cut of meat, but more than the supermarket's loss-leader prices." She also notes that, as with the chicken, "you must buy the more expensive steaks to get the [cheaper] ground beef." So once again, buying packaged meats on sale, and sticking to the cheaper cuts, is likely to give you a better price per pound than buying in bulk as Channon advises.

2. Juice. Channon says it's better for you to eat your fruit whole, and if you really want juice you should squeeze your own. I agree that whole fruit is more healthful than most bottled juice, which is why I drink very little of it. But as far as price goes, her advice once again falls short of the mark. As these figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show, Valencia oranges cost about $1.03 per pound, while orange juice concentrate costs $2.54 for 16 ounces, which is enough to make a half-gallon of juice. To get that amount of juice from the fruit, you'd have to squeeze 24 oranges, or between 6 and 8 pounds' worth, at a cost of $6.18 to $8.24. So while the home-squeezed juice might be more healthful (because it has the pulp in) and would almost certainly taste better, it would also be a lot more expensive.

3. Microwave popcorn. This is one item on which I agree with Channon. As long-time readers of this blog will recall, I make my own popcorn in a microwave popper at a cost of about 12.5 cents per bowl, and I season it with just a touch of olive oil and salt. Microwave popcorn in bags, by contrast, costs at least 25 cents per bag, even on sale, and is typically loaded with salt and butter (real or synthetic). So I consider the homemade popcorn an all-around win: in addition to being cheaper, it's more healthful, contains far less packaging, and is just as easy to make. (Channon recommends making it the old-fashioned way, in a pot on the stove, which is also fine, but I think my method is easier and just as tasty.)

4. Vegetables. According to Channon, you should either grow all your own vegetables or buy them at the farmers' market to "support your local farmers and local economy." According to my calculations, Brian and I do indeed pay less per pound for the veggies we grow ourselves (some time I'll get around to sharing the calculations with you), but our little garden isn't nearly big enough to supply all the produce we need—and even if we were to convert every square inch of our yard to edible landscaping, and buy a big freezer and canner to store the surplus, there's no way we'd be able to grow enough to get us through the winter without buying any. We couldn't pick up extra from the farmers' market to tide us over, either, because our local farmers' market runs only from June through November (though the associated artisans' market continues through the end of December).

Of course, as Challon would no doubt argue, we could always extra produce from the farmers' market when it's in season and preserve it at home. The problem is, in my observation, produce from the farmers' market almost always costs more than the same items would at the supermarket. Often, our area supermarkets even carry produce that's labeled as local—Jersey Fresh—at prices far lower than we'd pay by "cutting out the middleman" at the farmers' market. I realize this isn't the case everywhere; two-year-old studies in Vermont and Seattle, for instance, found that farmers' markets in those areas offered comparable prices on conventional produce and much better prices on organic. But around here, at least, the economies of scale at the supermarkets mean that they generally offer the best prices, even on produce that's organic or locally grown. This is not to say that I don't consider the produce from the farmers' markets worth the extra money, at least occasionally; I just look on it as a splurge, not a money-saving move.

5. Cookies. Surprisingly, Channon doesn't make the argument that you shouldn't eat cookies at all because they're bad for you, but she does say that it's much better to make them from scratch. I won't dispute that home-baked cookies made by anyone who's halfway competent taste much, much better than store-bought ones, but are they cheaper? I've seen big packages of generic-brand cookies at the supermarket for as little as a dollar; in fact, I've often thought that if I were ever seriously in danger of starving to death, and I just needed to get as many calories into my body as possible for the lowest possible price, it would be hard to do better than to live off one of these packages for a couple of days. Can a homemade cookie really beat that?

To find out, I calculated the cost of a batch of "Basic Refrigerator Cookies" from The Pillsbury Cookbook, which was the most basic, inexpensive-looking recipe I could find. Assuming that a cash-strapped baker would use margarine instead of butter, replace our usual organic sugar and free-range eggs with conventional versions, and leave out the nuts, I calculated the cost of the ingredients for this recipe using the figures from the BLS:

• 3/4 cup sugar (3/8 lb.), 24 cents
• 3/4 cup brown sugar (3/8 lb.), 29 cents
• 1 cup margarine (1/2 lb.), 59 cents
• 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract (1/4 ounce), 25 cents (based on the price I found at Trader Joe's last year)
• 2 eggs (1/6 doz.), 31 cents
• 3 cups all-purpose flour (1 1/8 lbs.), 60 cents
• baking powder and salt: 2 cents

This comes to $2.30 for the recipe, which supposedly makes 90 cookies (but would probably make no more than 75 without the nuts). So that's about 3 cents per cookie, while the cheap store-bought cookies were roughly 2 cents each. Not nearly as good, I'm sure, but definitely cheaper.

6. Spray cleaners. This is one of the few items for which Channon does give an approximate price: "You could pay $3 or $4 for that spray cleaner," she avers, yet its main ingredient is most likely vinegar, ammonia, or bleach, any of which can be bought more cheaply. This is one where I agree with her; vinegar costs about 45 cents a quart when you buy it in bulk, which works out to only 23 cents a quart when you dilute it 50-50 with water. A 28-ounce bottle of Method cleanser, by contrast, cost me $2.67 on sale at Target last year (the only reason I bought it was to get a new bottle to put my vinegar solution in). So good old vinegar and water, which is tough enough to handle most everyday cleaning jobs (and nontoxic, to boot), is definitely the frugal choice here.

7. Bottled water. Another item for which I agree wholeheartedly with Channon. As I noted way back in 2010, prices for bottled water range from 79 cents to over $150 per gallon, while tap water—which is actually held to higher health and safety standards and, in most tests, tastes as good or better—typically costs about half a cent per gallon. Even if you don't like the taste of your municipal tap water, you'll still pay far less by running it through a filter than you would by buying the bottled stuff, and you'll produce far less waste as well.

8. Herbs. I agree with Channon that these are way too expensive at the store. We've seen tiny packages selling for $2 or $3, and even if you buy a big bunch for a buck, as we do with parsley, you're left with the problem of how to use it all up before it goes bad. In most cases, when you use herbs, you only need a little bit, so it makes sense to follow Channon's advice and grow your own (either in a garden bed or in pots) and snip off pieces as needed. We have an herb bed outside our kitchen door in which we grow rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, and mint; they fade in the winter but pop up again green and healthy in the spring. We also grow lots of basil in the garden, and after the frost hits we usually manage to nurse one plant through the winter in a pot. However, we've had no success keeping either parsley or cilantro alive in pots, so if we need these in the winter, we usually either go ahead and buy a big bunch or make do with dried.

9. Bread. This is a tricky one. Brian and I (well, Brian mostly) do bake all our own bread, even after the demise of our bread machine earlier this year, but we do this largely because (a) fresh bread tastes better and (b) Brian likes to bake. And we do spend less on our homemade bread than we would on store-bought bread; according to my calculations, each loaf costs us between 80 cents and a dollar, while the BLS figures show the typical cost of a one-pound loaf ranging from $1.41 to $2.04. However, the bargain rack at our supermarket fairly often has loaves of slightly stale bread marked down to as little as a dollar, so if we made a habit of stocking up on these and freezing them, it would be nearly as cheap as baking our own. Of course, it would require a larger freezer, so for now baking it ourselves is still a better value.

10. Trash bags. Channon's argument here is that if you simply cut back on packaged foods, recycle most food containers, and compost food scraps, you will "have less trash" to throw away. All of this is true, but she overlooks the rather glaring fact that less trash is not the same thing as no trash. As I observed when analyzing the contents of our trash last year, there are still some items that can't be either avoided, recycled, or composted, such as dental floss (I've never found one that's biodegradable), bottle caps, cereal box liners, deodorant tubes, and the occasional styrofoam tray. Also, what about the bones from that whole chicken she just advised us to buy back at the top of the list? You can't compost those, even after you've made stock of them, so they'll have to go in the trash—and once they're in there, they'll begin to make your house unpleasant if you don't get them out to the curb in fairly short order.

Admittedly, cutting down on the amount of waste you produce will mean you go through far fewer trash bags. Brian and I have, I believe, bought only two large boxes of them since we moved into this house over six years ago. But still, we will need to buy some eventually—unless Channon has some alternative to offer that she didn't see fit to mention in her article.

So out of the ten items on Channon's list, there are five that I mostly agree with and five that I mostly disagree with. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to buy whole chickens or local produce, to eat whole fruit instead of juice, to bake your own cookies, or to cut down on waste; I'm just saying that these strategies won't necessarily save you money.

The "Skip It" list

A few weeks ago, the bloggers at Young House Love put up a post called "Skip It" (complete with a video of the '80s toy by the same name). Basically, it's a list of all the things they save money on by just forgetting about them entirely. Their list included food and drink (bottled water, alcohol), cleaning supplies (dusting spray, fabric softener) and some grooming items (most hair products, manicures, lipstick, perfume). Then, at the end, they named a few things that they can choose not to skip thanks to the money they save this way: "project materials, organic produce, cable TV, and ceramic animals."

Reading through their list, my response was more or less, "Check...check...check" as I passed by item after item that we had chosen to skip as well. However, there were a few differences, so I thought I'd write up my own Skip It list here and note how it compares to theirs.

• Food and drink: The Petersiks say they skip meat "three or four nights a week," which presumably means that they eat it on the other three or four nights. In our case, we eat meat more like three or four nights a month, but when we do, we eat only the free-range stuff. So for us, meat is both a skip and a splurge: we skip it most nights so that we can splurge on the humanely raised meats when we do indulge. Shari Petersik also skips Starbucks by making her chai at home from a mix, saving the Starbucks for "special occasions." I, however, prefer the Frappuccino to the chai, and I've never been able to make a reasonable facsimile of it at home, so I allow myself one per month as a special treat. (At 300 calories a pop, it's probably just as well that I don't indulge more often anyway.) Like the Petersiks, however, we skip bottled water in favor of a filter pitcher and reusable bottles, and we skip alcohol because neither of us cares for it much.
• Home care: The Petersiks' list includes both fabric softener and dusting spray. I don't think we've ever used either of these, although I will confess that we tend to skip dusting altogether more often than we should. As for fabric softener, I've never understood what it's really for; isn't fabric soft enough already? We also skip most store-bought cleaning supplies in favor of a few staples (dish soap, vinegar, and baking soda), and we've skipped paper towels in favor of rags and dishcloths. And one item we've never bought or even owned is an "air freshener," which I consider a total misnomer. (Yech.) We also join the Petersiks in skipping incandescent light bulbs, but frankly, I consider that a substitution rather than a skip. I mean, it's not as if we're choosing to go without electric lighting altogether.
• Media: Unlike the Petersiks, we skip anything beyond the most basic cable TV package (and the only reason we even have that is because the package deal was cheaper than phone and high-speed Internet alone). However, we join them in skipping the newspaper and getting most of our news online and from the radio. I don't currently pay for an online newspaper subscription, although I've thought about signing up for one just to support the struggling papers. But with the New York Times currently charging $5 a week and the Washington Post $2.50 a week, I'm not really convinced it's worth the money. I'd sooner go with a print subscription to the weekly Christian Science Monitor, which works out to only 83 cents a week. 
• Grooming products: Like the Petersiks, we skip gel, hairspray, mousse, serum, and other hair products beyond simple shampoo and conditioner. I also join Shari in skipping perfume and all "creams and self tanners." However, while she skips lipstick (but does use bronzer, mascara, concealer, and eye shadow), I use lipstick (a $4 tube from Burt's Bees) for special occasions, concealer (a $1 tube from Wet 'n' Wild) as needed, and nothing else. And, unlike Shari, I skip contact lenses: I used to wear them, but they always got dry and uncomfortable by late afternoon, and Brian actually likes the way I look in my glasses. So now I kick it old school.
• Services: We join the Petersiks in skipping dry cleaning by choosing clothes that are machine or hand washable (with the exception of one winter coat and Brian's good suit). I skip haircuts too, especially since I've never in my life gotten one I really liked—but unlike Shari, I've never gotten the hang of cutting my husband's hair, so he still goes to the barber a few times a year at $17 a pop. (And then I invariably complain that he made it too short.) I do join Shari in skipping manicures and pedicures, but unlike her, I don't bother polishing my nails at home, either. Just clean them, clip them, and call it good. The Petersiks do have one gym membership for John, but we skip them altogether; Brian gets his exercise by riding to work, and I take an hour-long walk every day, weather allowing. One other thing we skip that the Petersiks have is a cell phone plan. We do have one basic prepaid phone, but it's strictly for emergencies: we do not give out the number, period.
• Transportation: Like the Petersiks, we've skipped the second car; with me working from home and Brian biking to work as often as possible, there really is no need for it (and fitting two cars into our driveway would be a tight squeeze, too). The Petersiks skip bag-checking fees when flying by only packing carry-ons; we tend to go all the way and skip flying altogether.
• Kids: This is the biggest difference between our Skip It list and theirs. While the Petersiks skipped some baby-related expenses, like a diaper bag and disposable diapers, we have chosen to skip kids altogether—which means we skip a whole array of other expenses as well. This choice isn't for everyone, obviously, but for us it was the right one. And with nine (count 'em, nine) nieces and nephews, we'll never lack for a connection to the younger generation. We're comfortable with our roles of crazy aunt and uncle; Mom and Dad just wouldn't fit us.

So that's our Skip It list, or at least all of it that I can think of at the moment. How about yours? Do you skip some things that we keep, or keep things that we skip? And what kind of splurges do your skips allow you to enjoy?

Spring cleaning

Brian and I spent most of yesterday cleaning out our storage room (also known as the shop and the laundry room, but it does those jobs only occasionally and stores stuff 24/7). This time I remembered to take a "before" picture:

As you can see, the most obvious pile of clutter in the room is that mass of stuff on the worktable in the middle, most of which is seed-starting supplies that never got put away after we finished potting up all our seedlings for the year. So we started by going through that lot, emptying soil out of tubes, washing the tubes, discarding the more battered cartons, and neatly stacking the clean cartons in a big box marked "seed starting." The seeds themselves stayed out, since there are still several crops that have to go into the garden, but everything else was neatly contained in that box or thrown out. That made a pretty visible improvement right away.

After that, we moved on to tackling some clutter that was less visible, but just as unnecessary. For instance, I had two big bins full of scrap fabric, mostly old pairs of pants, and I had to go through all of that and admit that, realistically, it was pretty unlikely I'd ever use most of it. I still ended up keeping probably more than we needed (I doubt I'm actually going to need six pairs of old jeans just to make patches for newer jeans, for instance), but I still filled up two garbage bags with stuff to take to the  nearest textile recycling bin. I also made a smaller pile of still-usable clothing that can be donated to our local thrift shop. My scrap bin doesn't actually look all that different without the extra junk piled in and on it, but it's a lot easier to open and close.

Meanwhile, Brian was going through piles of other junk. We puzzled for a while over an assortment of electronic debris, trying to figure out what was e-waste we should recycle and what was just regular trash. We eventually decided we could safely trash all the cables, leaving just one small webcam and one old RF modulator to be taken to down to our local Department of Public Works for e-cycling. 

We also had a large box on one shelf marked "give away," full of random stuff that we can't use but still think might be useful to someone else. However, after my recent Freecycle blast, a lot of the larger items were gone, so we were able to consolidate the remainder into a much smaller box. I also pulled a couple of the items out to list them on Freecycle, as well as a few smaller things that we decided it would be amusing to stuff into Christmas stockings. (This also prompted me to get started on this year's holiday gift list, which we generally work on throughout the year as we pick up yard-sale finds and other bargains that come to hand.)

A lot of the remaining work was just tidying up: putting away tools, grouping items to be repaired on a designated "project" shelf, dumping out the accumulated sawdust and wood shavings from earlier woodworking projects, and vacuuming up all the dirt from our seed-starting ventures. Miscellaneous junk got dumped into trash bins (dried-up paint, packing foam) and bundled up for recycling (lots of corrugated cardboard). And after lots of trips upstairs and downstairs and out to the shed, here's what we had at the end of the day:

Doesn't actually look all that different from the "before" picture, does it? Hard to believe that we filled two big garbage cans with trash, two big trash bags with recyclable textiles, and two smaller bags with other items to be recycled, and yet somehow there seems to be just as much stuff in the room as there was before. But trust me, everything is much neater on the inside. At least, I now think that if I went down there looking for, say, a hammer, I could actually locate it within five minutes, which I didn't feel at all confident about before. 

Having a Freecycle blast

Lately, Brian and I have been doing a bit of spring cleaning. Our shed, which was nearly impossible to walk around in, is now probably the tidiest it's ever been. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a "before" picture to show you just how chaotic it used to be, but at least you can see from this "after" picture that it's quite neat and well-organized now. Whenever I go in there now, I find myself standing there for a few minutes just savoring all this room we have in there.

Most of the stuff we cleaned out of the shed eventually went back in, just in a more compact and well-organized way. But we did end up with several items to give away, so over the course of the past few weeks, I've been posting them all on Freecycle. I'd list three or four items at a time, and as they were taken, I'd remove the posts and list more items in their place. And since I was making all those posts anyway, I also started working my way through the box of stuff marked "giveaway" that's been sitting on a shelf in the shop for the past year or so, as well as listing a few other superfluous items. I actually belong to two different Freecycle groups, one for the Rutgers University/New Brunswick area and one for all of Middlesex County, so I started out by listing items on the Rutgers group in the hopes of giving them away to someone who lives close by. (I figure it's less wasteful to have the items picked up locally, since it involves less driving, and I also assume—or at least hope—that people who live nearby will be more likely to pick things up promptly.) If an item doesn't go within a few days, I'll post it on the bigger group, and if it still hasn't been taken within a week, I conclude that no one's interested.

Anyway, it occurred to me that this "Freecycle blast" might be a useful way to collect some data about what kind of items generate the most interest on Freecycle, and what kind are hardest to get rid of. As I worked my way through my pile of items, I kept track of what kind of response each item got: how many people responded, how quickly, and how long it took before the item was picked up. We still haven't completely gotten rid of everything, but most items have gone, including all the big ones, so I think I can go ahead and present my findings. So, here they are: Livingston's Laws of Freecycling.

• The items that are most in demand are useful, as opposed to decorative. A set of jumper cables, a beat-up old shovel, a half-full bag of dry cat food, a bottle of hand lotion, and an assortment of curtain rods all got multiple requests within the first 24 hours. By contrast, a glass jar for displaying a floating candle went several days before getting a nibble, and I still haven't found anyone willing to take any of our assorted mugs with cartoons on them (something everyone has too many of already).
• The condition of the item doesn't seem to matter that much. Whenever I post an item on Freecycle, I always disclose any problems with the item up front, because I don't want the person who picks it up to have any reason to feel cheated. Yet we had no trouble giving away a rusty old shovel, a digital camera that won't start unless its batteries are charged up to the brim, and a truly antiquated flatbed scanner.
• Bigger items are more likely to be taken on the larger Middlesex County group than on the local group.  Both the scanner and our old recirculating range hood got no offers when I first listed them, but when I posted the same items on the bigger group they were snatched up immediately.
• The more information you can provide about an item, the better. Of the two Freecycle groups I belong to, only the Middlesex County group lets you include a photo with your listing. However, I have discovered that when I post to the Rutgers group, I generally get a better response if I can find a picture of a similar item somewhere online. That helps people get a clearer idea of what's being offered, so that (a) they'll know if they're interested, (b) they'll know if they aren't interested and won't change their minds after seeing the item, and (c) they won't be disappointed with what they get. I also try when listing electronic items to include as much of the original documentation, software, cables, and other paraphernalia as I can scrounge up.
  
• In addition to being specific in describing the item, it's wise to be specific in stating your expectations about the pickup. I made one post offering three vintage glass ceiling light covers (see the photo for an example) with the note "please take all," and I still got two requests from people who wanted to take just one of them. Next time, I'll spell it out: "Please reply only if you are willing to take all three."
• It's best to avoid promising an item to someone unless that person can commit to a specific date and time for picking it up. Sometimes I've been kept dangling, waiting for a reply to my "So when should I expect you?" inquiry, while being forced to put off other people who asked for the same item and offered to come get it that very day. I used to give my address right away to anyone who requested an item, but lately I've taken to saying first, "Let me know when you can come get it, and I'll send you the address." I'm not as strict as some people, whose posts always include instructions to "include a date and time for pickup in your FIRST e-mail," but I might end up adopting that approach.

I'm hoping these rules will stand me in good stead when we finally get around to cleaning up the shop, which will probably be a much bigger job than the shed and yield an even larger volume of stuff to be Freecycled.

Product free when you buy the package

As an ecofrugal individual, I like to reduce waste whenever I can. And since nearly a third of all trash in this country comes from product packaging, one of the main ways I try to reduce waste is to choose products with less packaging. Case in point: cleaning products. Rather than buy a separate product for every room in my house, complete with its own bottle that has to be stored and eventually disposed of, I rely on just a few staples to clean nearly everything: dish soap, baking soda, and vinegar. A vinegar-and-water solution, stored in a spray bottle, is especially handy: a squirt of this and a swipe with a rag is a quick fix for anything from grease-splattered walls in the kitchen to smudgy windows. (It can even keep your car windows from icing up if you spray it on ahead of time—and if ice has already formed, spraying it with this will help melt it faster.)

The problem is that I use this stuff so often that I find I'm always running out and having to mix up more. The squirt bottle I use is a cheapie that cost me a couple of bucks at the drugstore, and while it works fine, it only holds a little over a cup. So when I had to interrupt my cleaning of the bathroom yesterday to refill the bottle, I finally got fed up and decided it was worth spending a couple of extra bucks on a bigger bottle. And since we needed to go out anyway to get some compost, I figured it would be no trouble to add a quick stop at Target to our agenda.

Once we managed to find the cleaning supplies at the Target, I found that they only had one decent-sized squirt bottle on the shelf, and the cost was $4.79—a bit more than I'd expected. But I reminded myself that my expectations about prices are often unreasonable, since I live in a little tightwad bubble in which things are hardly ever bought new, and that it was unlikely I'd find a bottle like this for less than five bucks anywhere else. And that would have been that, except that on the way to the checkout, we passed by a rack full of Method brand cleaning supplies. This is a 21st-century brand that's marketed to eco-conscious types: nontoxic, vegetable-based cleansers, no animal testing, and 100 percent recycled packaging that actually looks decent out on the counter. Yet unlike many "green" products, it isn't really more expensive than mainstream cleaners of the same type. In fact, the shelf at the Target proclaimed that most of the Method products, ranging from glass cleaner to dish soap in all manner of colors and fragrances, were on sale at 3 for $8. And most of them were in—guess what?—squirt bottles.

So I did a quick mental calculation: "Hmm, I could buy an empty bottle for $4.79, or I could buy a bottle of cleanser for $2.67, and after I used it all up, I'd have a perfectly good reusable squirt bottle." Even if it turned out I didn't like the Method cleaner at all, I could just dump it down the sink (hey, nontoxic, right?) and have the bottle for less than I would have spent to buy an empty one. How could I go wrong?

After perusing the selection for a while, I settled on the "all-purpose" cleanser in Pink Grapefruit scent, which I figured would be closest to my trusty vinegar-and-water solution (well, maybe not for de-icing car windows). I gave it a try today, and it seems to be able to handle quick clean-ups as well as the vinegar solution, if not necessarily better—and I will admit, it does smell better. So I think we'll be perfectly content to use this stuff in place of the vinegar for the next several months, and when it's gone, the bottle can get refilled with the old standby (possibly with a bit of citrus oil added to improve the scent).

What I found most interesting about this little exercise is that, when I came to think about it, it wasn't the first time I'd bought a product mainly to get the package. I can think of two more examples just off the top of my head:

• Last week, after waiting a couple of months in vain for Blue Bunny frozen yogurt to go on sale, we finally gave in and bought a container at full price so that I could reuse the lid for my bathroom compost bin.
• After several months of reading the increasingly shrill warnings about the dangers of reusing plastic water and soda bottles (most of which, by the way, turn out to be based on insufficient evidence), and the repeated admonishments to go out and buy a safe, reusable bottle such as a $20 Kleen Kanteen, I decided instead to go to the store and buy a $1.29 glass bottle of Snapple. After drinking the contents, I washed out the bottle, filled it with plain tap water, and stashed it in the car, where it's continued to live (aside from the occasional re-washing) ever since.

The thing about these purchases is that, since what I'm really buying is the packaging, it's almost like getting the product itself for free. Buy a $2.66 plastic spray bottle, and get a quart of all-purpose cleaner free; buy a $1.29 glass water bottle, and get a pint of Snapple free; buy a $4.49 compost container, and get seven cups of frozen yogurt free. (Okay, maybe that last one wasn't really such a bargain, but I wasn't having any luck finding a better deal.) Of course, for someone who normally tries to reduce the amount of packaging I buy, it is a bit ironic to be buying products just for their packaging—but if the alternative is buying the package without the product, and paying more for it, that doesn't really make any more sense, does it?

Has anyone else ever done this—buying a product primarily to get the container? Can you add any more examples to my list?

Green and Greener

Earlier this week I saw an ad online for a company called "The Check Gallery" that calls itself "the green choice for checks." Their checks, they claim, are all printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. If I still used checks on a regular basis, I might have been tempted to pay the $13 for a couple of boxes of these. But I go through checks so slowly these days that I'm still working my way through the box my husband and I got when we opened our current checking account more than four years ago. (We changed addresses shortly after that, but I couldn't bring myself to throw out a practically new box of checks and order new ones; I've just been crossing out our old address and writing in the new one on every check I use for the past four years.)

The reason I use so few checks now is that our bank offers free online bill payment, and so nearly every bill we receive on a regular basis—phone, cable, credit cards, utilities—gets paid that way. I use a check four times a year to pay our water bill, and once in a very great while to pay a merchant who doesn't accept credit cards. Even my taxes now get paid electronically. And as far as I can tell, this option is not only quicker and cheaper than paying by mail with a check; it's also greener. There's no paper waste, and no fuel used for mailing the stuffed envelopes (or for manufacturing new checks and shipping them to me). Admittedly, I do presumably use some electricity to run my computer for the minute or two it takes to log on and pay a bill—but considering that my computer is on nearly all day anyway for work, I'd say the extra electricity used is negligible. (In fact, if I weren't taking a break from work to pay my bills, I'd probably just take a break to play solitaire and keep the computer on anyway.)

This got me thinking about how many other things that are touted as "green" choices are actually less green—and in many cases, less frugal—than other alternatives. Here are a few examples I was able to come up with:

1. Paper bags rather than plastic ones. Actually, in terms of their overall resource use, it's not altogether clear that paper bags are greener than plastic—but it is decidedly clear that neither one is as green as a reusable bag, which also nets you anywhere from two to ten cents off each time you shop.
2. Household products, such as cleaners, that are marketed as nontoxic and eco-friendly. Some of these are genuinely green and some not obviously so—but pantry staples, such as baking soda, vinegar, and salt, are decidedly nontoxic and much cheaper than either the "green" cleaning products or their conventional equivalents.
3. Clothes made from hemp, bamboo, and other sustainable fabrics. These are probably greener than new clothes made from conventional cotton (the most pesticide-heavy crop on the planet) or petroleum-derived synthetics, but they can't compare to secondhand clothes, which require no materials and no energy to produce.
4. Recycled-paper products such as tissues (not as green as reusable handkerchiefs) and copier paper (not as green as one-side-used paper that would otherwise go straight into the bin).

Those are all the examples I could come up with off the top of my head. Can you think of any others?