DIY hand soap

We use an obscene amount of hand soap in this house.  We're not crazy clean people, by any means, but we have a 3.5yo little BOY and a baby, so we are all constantly washing our hands.  My 3.5yo is finger painting, and snacking on sticky things, and going potty (all.by.himself.) And the baby is obviously dirtying his diapers and the changer of said diapers definitely wants/needs to wash their hands, often.  I'm obviously not interested in spending at least $3 every week to replenish our soap supply (helloooo the name of this blog should give you a clue I'm super cheap, ahem, frugal).  So, I took to pinterest to find out how to save money on hand soap, and it did not disappoint.

I know the first thing you're thinking, "just by the refills, that's cheap!".  Yah, it's not NEARLY this cheap, although I will fully admit, it's easier, so if you're supah lazy (like I tend to be on occasion) then this isn't for you.  It's just a question of how much you want to save, and how green you want to be.  I've said it before I'm just a shade of green, by no means the queen of green, for me, sometimes convenience wins.  But not this time :).  We made a GALLON of hand soap using this method, for essentially the cost of a bar of good bar of soap, so like $4-$5.  A GALLON people, it's lasted us a few months now so I will be doing this again.  Truth be told, the hubs made the first batch, but I observed and it wasn't hard at all.

Almost gone, this was full when we made it though!

re-use one of the bottles for hand soap you have

We used the pinterests and followed the method outlined in this post by The Farmer's Nest.  We actually used Mrs. Meyer's Lemon Verbana and it smells great, very clean.  Like she says in her post, save the jug from the distilled water and put your homemade soap in there for storage.  And make sure you keep the bottles from the hand soap you bought before you knew you could make it to refill with this MUCH cheaper version ;).

These are the supplies, you can get easily from Amazon, and this will give you MORE than enough to get started!  You can make like 6 batches with this stuff for under $40.

Truth?  She mentions this in her post, but it kinda does look/feel like snot, but it does the job, so really can we be so picky?  Keep in mind when you buy it pre-made from the store you are paying for WATER, I mean really, when she put it like that, I was fully motivated to try it out.  So I already mentioned, it's cheap, it's green because you are not buying all kinds of plastic bottle packaging and and soap that potentially has an assortment of chemicals in it.  You know exactly what is in this.  I say, try it out, what's the worst that could happen?  You don't like it, and go back to buying soap.  OR you could love it and love saving money ;).