Hello friends! I hope you are all having a lovely summer. This summer has been busier than I expected, but I am thankful for the work. Today, I took a break from work to try my hand at making some homemade cleaning products. My adventures of choice were homemade laundry detergent and homemade liquid hand soap.

I have been wanting to try both of these recipes for months, but just never got around to it. Finally we ran out of laundry detergent, and I thought, now is the time! I have linked to recipes I used above, just in case you want to give it a shot. I made half a batch of each to see if we liked them. Here is the cost breakdown for each:

Laundry Detergent
3/4 of a bar of soap, grated- I got this free with coupons
1/2 cup Borax- I got a 76oz box at Wal-Mart for 3.36 so I used approximately 17 cents worth for this batch
1/2 Baking Soda- 14 cents worth*
Total Cost– 17 cents for 12 loads or 2 cents a load Can’t beat it :) (Please excuse my less than perfect math)

*Note most homemade detergent recipes call for washing soda because it is much stronger than baking soda. I chose to use baking soda because we don’t have a lot of large stains, and we had it on hand. I would recommend using washing soda, especially if you have children. Washing soda can be found next to the Borax in the laundry isle. Also, some bloggers that I read suggest specific types of soap, but again, the major reason I am doing this is to save money, so I wanted use what we already had on hand.

All you have to do to make this is grate the soap and mix the ingredients together. Make sure to mix them really well. I will let you know if I like how it works!

Liquid Hand Soap
1/4 cup of bar soap, finely grated- I got this free with coupons
2 1/2 cups water
1/4 tbsp Glycerin -Free because I purchased this on Amazon using Swagbucks. (If you are unfamiliar with Swagbucks, see my post here).
Total cost- free

However, if you had to pay for the soap and glycerin they cost would around $1 a

batch. My batch looks like it will fill about 3 bottles of hand soap, so that’s about 33 cents a bottle.

All you do to make this is mix the ingredients together in a pan on the stove over medium heat, until the soap flakes dissolved (about 4 minutes). Let the mixture cool completely before putting it into soap dispensers.

Again, refer to the links above for more information. I really enjoyed making these products, and I love the fact that they are better for the environment and for us. The only hard part was grating the soap, which did take a good bit of time. However, considering that you can often get a bar of soap for free with coupons, I think the savings are worth the extra elbow grease.