My Make-Do Monday May 11th - Saving on Dish Soap

My favorite being Frugal idea:

Back to 1998 when our little family bought an old 1970ish Motorhome. Well it was a good deal, but then it had a roof leak and the engine was a bit iffy sometimes, but we had a blast for a couple of years. We named her Matilda and took her everywhere.

She had two sinks in the kitchen. Which would make washing dishes an easy task. The only problem was water. I could not justify filling up the two sinks to do traditional dish washing. So I took a spray bottle and filled with 3/4 full with water, then I added a tiny squirt of dish soap, mixed it well and now I had my dishwater!

So I would scrap the dishes, using a rubber scrapper that would take most of the food and residue off. I would avoid stacking them, so not to get them more dirty. Then I would spray the dish wipe/scrub with a brush and then I would sit it in the sink- no water yet. After all the dishes were sprayed, scrubbed and stacked, I would then fill a bowl with rinse water. A bowl usually used less water than the sink, but it was also deeper. Then I would rinse all the dishes and let them drip dry on a towel until I was done washing them all. Then I would finish drying them and put them away. We used a lot less water this way, our water supply was happy. Our septic tank was happy. Less soap was used over all. So I think it worked good.

Now we don’t have Matilda any more, she just wore out, it was sad. We sold it to a mechanic and he used it once in a while, he does pretty good on keeping her moving. She just needed a mechanic, which we were not. We want another motorhome someday, I think it would be awesome.

In our own home, in our own kitchen I still use this method. I have a small squirt bottle on the side of the sink that gets pretty good use. If I have already done the dished for the day, we can keep the rest of the dishes done by spraying and rinsing. Most of my pots and pans don’t take soap, but if they did, it would make the pot clean up easier too.

I remember when I was living in Norway, my first companion and I had one sink. It was in our entry way, it looked like a bathroom sink. We had no kitchen. We lived in one room and had a hotplate to cook on. We cleaned our dished in this sink. I wish I had figured out this spray bottle thing back then. It would have made a lot of things easier. But as it were, my companion was from England and she told me that she grew up washing dishes in soap water and then putting them up to dry without a rinse.

I don’t know if others do it that way, but she did, even when we had a kitchen with two sinks. But I had this idea that the dishes might have soap on them and I did not think soap would be good in my tummy. Who knows? I am still alive so things couldn’t have been too bad with how we did things.

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Thanks for visiting with me today and leave me a comment if you have the time.

Now jump back to Ann's site for more ideas.

Sharinskishe

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