Are You Cleaning Out Your Own Wallet?

While MMM has provided many great pearls of wisdom in past posts, this particular post has turned our stomachs. It is obvious that the average household wastes hundreds of dollars a year on unnecessary cleaning products. It is great advice to switch from expensive cleaners to bleach, ammonia, etc. But to take it a step further by showering less, giving clothes the “sniff” test, washing sheets and towels infrequently, etc. is not being frugal, it’s being CHEAP. Reusing towels for weeks on end is UNSANITARY. Not cleaning your toilets on a weekly basis is UNSANITARY. Crawling between the sheets when you’re covered in sweat, bacteria and even just body oils on a daily basis, and washing them on the same infrequent schedule as your bath towels is UNSANITARY. There is a huge difference between being “overclean” and “dirt phobic” and maintaining basic sanitary living conditions in a home — not to mention basic human dignity!! What is next? A recommendation that we switch from toilet paper to leaves and newsprint to save even more money? We all have the right to live how we want in our own homes, but I am also free NOT to associate with people I encounter who believe that throwing on some extra deodorant is a substitute for taking a shower.

Absolutely right on! And now I feel even better about my gradual lack of interest in maintaining the ultimate clean house. Maybe as I get older, I’d rather use my precious energy for things that are more important.

I love the comment re. hand-making your own towels.

Thanks for another great post, as always…
:-)

Jane
P.S. I just added your blog to the list of links on mine as “one of my favorite blogs.”

The subject of the hygiene hypothesis has turned up in discussion of this topic, and with good reason. I’m a 53 year old geriatric who went to public and high school in the 1960s and 1970s, and don’t ever recall other kids with peanut allergies and very few other allergies. Now it’s commonplace, so what’s going on here? As some posters mentioned above, when you are a kid your immune system is (or should be) exposed to all kinds of germs in the environment. It’s like a self calibration instrument that learns what is harmless (most of the germs out there) and to ignore it. When deprived of this experience, it doesn’t know what’s harmless or not and over reacts to a lot of harmless stuff.
How did this change happen? Two reasons 1) kids spending less time playing outside and getting dirty (and exposed to germs) because they are inside watching TV or playing video games and 2) this obsession with hyper cleanliness is most likely also a contributing factor.
If you have kids, shut off the X Box (or whatever) and get them outside playing. Not only will their immune system benefit, but they will get more exercise and possibly even get some social skills if the interact with any other kids outside.

Great post. I like that you challenge conventional thinking. In my modern Western world I see too many people leading over indulged, narcissistic and neurotic lives all due (in my humble opinion) to advertising and our reliance on consumption to make the world go round. It is so good to read comments from people who understand the folly of too much sanitation. My personal awakening came after the birth of our daughter who in the early years experienced eczema and asthma. During those years I was hell bent on eliminating bacteria with all sorts of cleaners, bleaches and sterilisers. One day it dawned on me that if I line dry washing outside the UV light will destroy harmful bacteria etc. So I stopped using powerful antibacterial and bleaching powders on clothes. My child’s eczema disappeared. Now this may just have been a coincidence but for me it set me on a course of eliminating all chemical cleaners from our home. Years on and we are still chemical free. No one has died or become seriously ill as a result. In fact I think we are healthier for it. My daughter is 18 now and does not use shampoo or soap and her skin and hair glow. She doesn’t smell or look unclean. As for general cleaning, I love a bit of clean dirt around the place. It is good for our immune system. I cringe when I walk into a spotless house and can smell the chemical cleaners. That is what I call a filthy, dirty house. And to all those people who proclaim the need for a daily shower and clean towel or who can’t bear to wear anything more than once, all I can say is ‘get real’! Water is a finite resource, and fresh, clean water is precious and needs to be used wisely. Don’t waste it on your obsessions.

I wasn’t going to comment until I read the last paragraph.

Your house doesn’t have to be sterile even when your babies are born at home! *Your* germs in *your* house are much better for your new baby than a “sterile” hospital full of everybody else’s germs.

Upon reflecting on the comments I am going to go wash my sheets.

Your post reminds me of my teenage years, living in West Germany. My parents kept the house at 68F and the weather was mild. We showered every two or three days. The other days I’d wash my face and my pits and spray on some deodorant. They were stinky days.

As to soap, I have reduced the amount of laundry detergent used, I wasn’t measuring precisely and was using double the recommended amount.

My husband is a doctor who grew up in the mountains on the eastern seaboard/upstate NY. We have always made sure our home was NOT sterile. We wear our clothes until they are dirty or smell – not for five minutes. Our children and grandchild were brought up the same way and are rarely sick. We are all healthy, active and lean. We are also happy and well adjusted with a fuck you attitude to people who judge by how spit and shiny your house is and if your gardener made sure your lawn and bushes were trimmed to within an inch of their lives (please, remember that birds and insects and bees and butterflies rely on your haphazard, overgrown natural yard so don’t mow your lawn – better still grow veg if your HOA will allow it – we do not have a gardener and we do not have an hoa). The hippies had the right idea. Change the world by example and stop showing off. So many of the childhood health problems are caused not by dirt and dust, but by the chemicals we use to combat them. Nature has it all figured out; a clean cotton rag. some uncontaminated water to clean and natural materials to build and furnish our homes. Empty your house of everything unnatural and you may be living in a teepee, but your children will be healthier, you’ll be healthier and the world will thank you. Be a stache and save your money for freedom.

Have just read your blog and am now commenting before I ever read the rest of the comments. Just want to say I live in Hawaii….and you need to shower every day! And you need to wash the towels after a few days. Nothing like being the unshowered and smelly person on the aeroplane who nobody wants to sit next to.

So many things to say, so little space.

Laundry – if towels are hung up, they dry. Before dryers, everything was dried on lines, so there was no way sheets and towels were being washed often. Back before fitted sheets, my mother had three sheets per bed. Each week she washed the bottom sheet, moved the top sheet to the bottom,and put a fresh sheet on top. This was standard. The thinking was that the bottom sheet got dirtier because it was being lain on, the top sheet was just lying over the bodies. So an individual sheet got washed every second week. This obviously doesn’t work with fitted sheets.
No one has mentioned fabric softener – that is such a waste. Line-dried clothes don’t get stiff if there is a freeze, especially if they are given a good shake before being hung. In winter I pop towels in the dryer on tumble (no heat) to fluff them up a bit, then line dry them inside (good for pollen allergies too), Fabric softener is useless for towels, it coats the fibres and they can’t absorb water.
I am allergic to house dust and feathers – I have foam pillows, and when I bought this house I had the rugs ripped out and hardwood floors installed. I never vacuum – I sweep and damp mop and that gets the grit and the dog hair. I also have mats at the front and back doors, which catch most dirt (people feet, dog paws) before it enters the house. And of course, the stereotype that Canadians take their shoes off in the house is often true – well, would you want to wear boots covered in snow or slush into your house 6 months out of the year? The rest of the time it is habit.
Dish clothes – I have gone back to knitting them with handicraft cotton. Rough enough to scrub, soft enough that nothing is scratched, easy to throw in the laundry with towels. Inexpensive enough to have one for every day of the week. I usually wipe all my counters with suds from washing the dishes, that is as much cleaner as I want on them – and they are wiped again with just water, no cleanser, so no soap residue. I learned in Cub leader training that the biggest cause of tummy upsets at camp is dishes that did not have the dish soap properly rinsed off.
Bathrooms – I have microfibre clothes for general cleaning, one dampened for cleaning and one dry for polishing, my mirrors and sinks sparkle, with no cleaners.
Toilets – pour a bit of cheap shampoo in, and scrub – just as clean as expensive and nasty toilet bowl cleaners (got that one from Fly Lady).
Clothes – if they were worn in a clean environment (i.e. an office) they are probably good for another day. Wool (i.e. sweaters) especially should be aired, not washed, for every day use. Of course socks and underwear need washing more often. I had school uniforms (public school, not private) as a student, which actually got us in good habits – get home, change to more casual clothes, hang up the school blazer and skirt, they were fine. Same for gardening or any other grubby occupation – garden or whatever, get all sweaty, have a shower and change, so dirty clothes are not worn in the house and non-gardening clothes are not worn for gardening (this assumes your gardening clothes are like mine, on their way to the garbage once they are too worn for gardening).
Most of the cleaning we do is because society (read business and advertising) tells us we should. Bacteria are everywhere, the important thing for our health is which bacteria. Most are ones we can live with, or actually need, and they are the ones we want in our homes, on our skin, and in our guts. If we bring their numbers down too much, it makes room for less benign bacteria. Any evolutionary biologist would say this is basic – most people are not evolutionary biologists ;-(
Obviously those with specific health issues will have to modify their arrangements.
Oh, and those with skin issues might find gong to a low carb, high animal fat diet, with summer sun exposure, will help. At my latitude (north of 45), I cannot make vitamin D from October to April, not that much skin is exposed anyway when temperatures are ranging from 0 to -10F around here.

I was just telling one of my buddies today about you, and then mentioned that you would probably laugh at me(and rightfully so) for having just hired maids at a frequency of once every two weeks. I told him I was not a true mustachian, due to this and other bad spending habits(fine dining), but hey, you can’t argue with a 55% savings rate after taxes either! It’s not great, but not bad.

For some reason, when I read this post I thought of that Far Side cartoon where the rats are in their dirty, broken living room and one of them says something like, “It’s supposed to be a rat hole!” I honestly find it difficult to believe that their home is swept and vacuumed as infrequently as MMM thinks it is. I suspect that either Mrs. MM is doing work that he just “doesn’t see” or that they are doing cleaning as part of their routine and he just doesn’t think of it as cleaning.

Personally, I’m not a bleach-crazy clean freak, and I switched over to cleaning with vinegar and baking soda a couple of years ago. But, as one of the commenters said, there is a certain amount of sweeping and vacuuming that is part of the maintenance of flooring and extends the life of it. It is not frugal to allow flooring or other household fixtures to deteriorate due to lack of maintainence. This is also true of showers or bathrooms where mold might grow. The fact that the MMM household doesn’t have mold growing in their bathroom tells me that there is cleaning/maintenance going on that MMM either doesn’t realize is happening, or maybe doesn’t even identify as “cleaning” because it doesn’t involve lots of caustic chemicals.

They probably do a lot of preventative maintenance that means they don’t have to clean that often. For example, in our shower we use a squeegee to remove the water and soap from the walls every time we take a shower. We also leave the shower curtain open and use a fan to remove moisture. As a result, we only have to clean our shower every 3-4 months. In addition, the MMM family doesn’t have pets, and I’m sure they remove their shoes at the door, so they probably don’t have a lot of dirt on their floors, and I imagine they just sweep up after meals, etc., when necessary.

In short, I doubt that they are living in an UNSANITARY!! rat hole. ;-)

I read this post and all the comments with a growing interest, because:
– as a french woman living in Europe, I am absolutely fascinated by the north-american cleanliness obsession. It seems really, incredibly exagerated to me although I don’t consider myself as the best example of frugality in this field (I shower almost once a day, sometimes twice)… Reading all this is really interesting. My conclusion: we, european are less subjects to intense marketing and social pressure in this field (but it is different on other subjects like food and milk for example)…
– I already knew that there was a lot of savings to obtain (we use few, green cleaning products)… but we can achieve more…
– You are very brave, Mr MMM to deal with this subject in your blog (that I read a lot)! Very good job!

I owned a cleaning business for many years and learned a lot about cleaning chemicals. The usual household cleaners are overkill for most situations, not to mention quite expensive.

“Pro” stuff in concentrate, from a janitorial supply, is 5-20x cheaper than consumer brands, and it’s mostly the same stuff — from Windex-type glass cleaner to dish soap to degreaser to oven cleaner.

Liquid dish soap will do most cleaning jobs, with a dash on a wet sponge or scrub pad, or with water in a bucket or spray bottle. Water with a little soap is an amazing solvent, just let it soak a little. Avoid the stronger stuff unless you really need it, as it’s harsh, expensive, and toxic.

Vinegar (an acid) and baking soda (a base, like soap or ammonia) are both good cleaners, and non-toxic. Vinegar will cut hard water soap scum almost as well as harsh, toxic, and very expensive bathroom cleaners.

Branded dish soap, and hand soap, is usually way more concentrated than it needs to be, and can be cut 2:1 or more, for a less goopy mix that rinses better. Try it!

As others have said, the mechanical rubbing and scrubbing is at least as important, which is why we’re supposed to rub our hands for 20 seconds or sing all the way through “Happy Birthday.”

Most soaps are too harsh for your skin at any concentration, with a PH of 8, 9 or more. “Strength” is really about PH, and optimal for your skin is as close to a neutral of 7 as possible. The most widely available low-PH dish soap is Palmolive Clear. A lot of hand, face, and body soaps are neutralized with the addition of some acid, while others are more highly refined.

Another waste of money (and trees, and landfill space) is paper towels. Buy a 10 LB box of surgical towels or restaurant towels, and use those instead — for everything — wiping up spills, general cleaning, as Swiffer pads, whatever. That box costs no more than a couple of months’ worth of paper towels for most families, and will last years. Another load of laundry every week or two is negligable. Store the normal dirty ones in a laundry bag, and the really dirty ones in a bucket of water with a little soap (pickle buckets w/ lids are great).

Finally, blogs and forums about cloth diapering are a great resource for ideas about cleaning with cheap, reusable, natural, and non-toxic products. Those who want to get into cloth diapering too can save a lot of money, but that’s another whole topic!