Homemade glass cleaner

OK, glass cleaner is cheap.  The last bottle we bought was from the dollar store.  $1.25 plus tax.  But can we do better?  As it turns out: easily!  This stuff is not rocket science.

I did some digging around and found this excellent review of a few different ways of making glass cleaner.  Because we don't have rubbing alcohol on hand, I went with version 3.

Ingredients:
2 c hot water
1/3 c vinegar
1 tbsp cornstarch

Mix together.  Pour into an old spray bottle.  That's it!  It works great.  It's supposed to work even better with the rubbing alcohol, but I'm pretty okay with it as is.

Homemade dryer sheets?

No, we're not really going to make homemade dryer sheets.  But when we ran out, like everything else we've run out of in the past month or so, it led to two questions:

1) Do we really need this product?

2) If yes, can we make it ourselves with less chemicals -- or more cheaply?

Of course, we should be air drying our clothing during our Year of Less.  However, let's be realistic.  It's January in Vancouver.  Nothing's going to air dry until July or so.

Okay, so we're going to dry.  Is it necessary to use dryer sheets to have soft clothes?  Well, not really.  But it's sort of nice when they're not all staticky.

I did some googling and it turns out that you can get soft, static-free clothing by doing two simple things.  First, add a tablespoon or two of vinegar to the fabric softener drawer in your washing machine (if you mix it with the soap, you neutralize the soap -- so don't!).  Then, when it comes time to dry, use some of those rubber/plastic dryer balls.  We already had some, so it wasn't an added purchase.

The end result?  To be honest, it's no different than if we'd use dryer sheets full of chemicals.  Another successful experiment and forever-change in our household!  (And, I found that we still have a bunch of dryer sheets in a place I hadn't looked before.  I suppose we'll still use them up, but we'll definitely not buy them ever again.)

In conclusion, it turns out that dryer sheets are pretty unnecessary.  It makes a person stop and wonder how many other products we've been subtly convinced to buy through clever advertising...

The bike dilemma

Obviously, buying a bike is not permitted in a year in which you're trying to avoid all capital expenditures.  But still...

I got a new job.  I start next week.  It's 6 mi / 10 km from home.  Since moving back to central Vancouver -- and being close to a light rail station that Erin can use for commuting -- we don't use the car much anymore.  I'd like to keep it that way.  Thus my need for a commuter bike.

Our thought process was this.

1) Can't buy one.  Make do with my existing bike, which is a mountain bike suited to...well...mountains.  It has a suspension.  Suspensions absorb energy.  Energy that you put in.  Awesome for hills and trails.  Not awesome for non-sweaty commuting.  Also, the bike has rugged tires.  Not ideal, but deal with it.

2) After much discussion earlier in the month, we decided that perhaps a good compromise was to buy slick tires to put on the bike.  That'd make it much more efficient.  But then again, it's still a crappy bike for city commuting -- and a set of decent slicks would cost $80.  That's a fair chunk of change for a non-ideal situation.

3) Buy a cheap commuter bike when we go to Portland (US prices and no sales tax -- yeah!).  When we were there in October, I saw a sweet new bike for just $400.  That should be allowed.

4) But wait -- new?  No way.  There must be used deals out there.  Talking this through with others, it turned out that our friend Sarah knows a great secondhand/repair bike shop in Portland.  We're dialed in.  The plan is to walk in, test ride a few bikes, and buy one on the spot.  Ideal budget: $200.  Max budget: $400.  To offset this price, I will sell my mountain bike.  It's an old $1000+ bike that will hopefully fetch at least $200 or $300.

A forthcoming posting will report how this turns out.

Homemade mouthwash

Another day, another empty bottle.  This time it was mouthwash.  First off, we really even need mouthwash?  I like to use it off and on.  Erin, too.

Last year, I decided to go back to old school Listerine only -- none of the fancy pants colored/flavored varieties.  Just plain Listerine.  It doesn't taste good.  Erin calls it asswash.  Fair enough.

She picked us up a bottle of Tom's of Maine baking soda mouthwash a few months back.  It came in a nice 500 mL bottle (as opposed to one of those gargantuan jugs you see in the big shops).  It was different, but good.  Anyway, that's the one that just ran out.  I did a bit of online research and then invented a new mouthwash recipe based on a few things I found.

Brian's mouthwash:
16 oz / 500 mL water
1 cinnamon stick
1 tbsp hard liquor
2 tsp baking soda
5 drops tea tree oil

Heat the water with the cinnamon stick in it.  As soon as it reaches boiling, remove it from the heat.  Stir in the baking soda until thoroughly dissolved.  Let things cool down, then add the liquor and tea tree oil.  Voila!  Put in an empty bottle you already had on the shelf.

The very first time you taste this, you may want to spit it out.  But beyond that, I guarantee you'll love it!  It's sort of like candy-apple flavored.  It does a nice job of freshening breath.

Homemade shampoo and conditioner

On returning from my trip to Minnesota, I found that my lovely wife had finished the last of our store-bought shampoo and had taken it upon herself to make some more from scratch.

The original recipe is from the David Suzuki foundation website (direct link to the PDF here -- other homemade haircare recipes are also included), with a few small modifications.  Here you go:

Make a "tea" using the following amounts of water and dried herbs:
2 c water (use distilled if you live somewhere with chemically-tasting water)
2 tbsp peppermint
2 tbsp lavender
2 tbsp nettle
2 tbsp rosemary

Once it's cooled, throw away the solids.  Add:
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp witch hazel
~ 1 tbsp xanthan gum
10 drops cedarwood essential oil
10 drops tea tree essential oil

Xanthan gum isn't in the orginal recipe, but we added it after using the original shampoo for a week and not liking it's "liquid"-ness.  It's hard to incorporate this completely (think: adding flour to soup stock), but it's possible if you use a whisk attachment on an immersion blender.

Lastly, stir in:

1/2 c vegetable glycerin
1/4 c decyl glucoside

The decyl glucoside isn't in the original recipe, but the shampoo won't lather without it and we weren't liking this aspect.  Of all the lathering agents (surfactants), decyl glucoside seems the tamest.  (In the natural product world, the most common surfactant -- sodium laureth sulfate -- seems to be regarded as one of the world's great evils.)

Anyway, this shampoo is pretty great.  This recipe makes enough to fill a 500 mL (~16 oz) bottle -- reused from a previous shampoo bottle, of course.

A side bonus is that after battling winter dry scalp for a decade or two -- and consuming Head & Shoulders, T-Gel, and countless other products without great results -- my head is healthier than it's been since I was about five.  Good job, Erin!

Oh, and you don't need conditioner with this, largely because you haven't stripped the hell out of your hair's natural oils.  The aforementioned website recommends a rinse that you use about once per week.

Ingredients:
2 cups water
~ 1/2 tbsp of apple cider vinegar
~ 1/2 tbsp of xanthan gum

Again, the xanthan gum is our addition, simply because we like it to be somewhat more gel-like.

When we set out on the Year of Less, we didn't anticipate making our own shampoo and conditioner -- these items were certainly not on our list of things to avoid.  That said, we love these products, they were easy to make, and they cost less than even the cheapest store-bought items.  We did have to buy some products we didn't have (essential oils, decyl glucoside, glycerin, witch hazel, etc.), but as future entries will show, these will be important essentials in our household from now on -- for a variety of reasons.

Activity book for a 2-year-old

Ah, one of the year's first big challenges: what to get Brian's two-year-old niece for her birthday?!

Normally, I'd go to Amazon and look up reviews for some books with great educational value.  Or check out Melissa & Doug toys.  Or wander the local shops for other ideas.  Since these aren't options for us in 2013, Erin suggested that we make an activity book.

The idea is to construct a book that will teach a child how to use a zipper, tie shoelaces, learn how clothespins work, figure out how to work a belt.  You know, stuff dealing with tactile development -- a learning tool, but fun, too.

Erin did a great job taking the lead on this.  I headed back to Minnesota for a four-day weekend and was able to deliver the gift in person.  It was a big hit -- as of Day Two, anyway!

Also great -- besides the fact that we both put a lot of love into making it -- was the fact that it cost us only about $2 to make.  We had to buy a few sheets of colored felt and some zippers.  The rest was made with stuff we already owned: buttons, scraps of recycled clothing, old shoestrings, bits of velcro, etc.

Stuff we "need"

There's so much stuff we want.  I want books, books, and more books.  My way of dealing with the No-Buy clause is to compile a list of all of the ones I'd normally be tempted to buy.  Despite the fact that we have enough unread books to last us several years, there's this desire for more.  Where does that come from?

For me, it's about not forgetting.  I leave things out when I plan to use them in the next day (much to Erin's occasional annoyance).  When I stumble across a book I'd like to read, I buy it (usually secondhand, on ABEBooks).  That way, I can't forget it -- visually it will be there for me at such future point as my eyes spot it on a bookshelf.  The thing is, there are relatively few (perhaps 25%) books that I read that, after reading, I desire to read again or own.  Therein lies waste.

Thus the list.  We've started a notebook.  The first page is a list of the books I'd like to buy.  The second page is the other stuff we'd like to buy -- and normally would have, had it not been for this 2013 experiment.  Included are new wine glasses, new skis for Erin, and an iron so that I can use the old one for waxing skis.

Other pages detail unavoidable expenses -- which we'll get into in subsequent entries.

A week or so into 2013, one thing that's been fun is all the discussion that we've spawned.  Erin says how she craves coffee and needs to plan ahead to avoid buying it in passing (she even carried a glass jar of instant coffee with her so she can make her own from boiling water).  I say how much I'd like the game Crokinole.  And a new commuter bike.  We discuss whether I/we need these things and how to get around it.

It's fun to slowly use up bottles of shampoo, conditioner, soaps, glass cleaners, etc.  Something that we've decided to add to the mix is lowering our usage of chemicals.  Ahead: the challenge of making many of these items from scratch.

The premise

On New Year's Day, we sat around reflecting on the past few days we'd spent in Victoria, BC with friends Sarah and Luke.  Our friend Luke's parents are both ordained monks who live fairly simply -- they'd somehow survived for decades without some of our favorite kitchen accessories.  This led to a discussion of what we really needed.  Which led to a discussion of surprising credit card bills and how there was always something to make each month's statement higher than need be.  Which led to a discussion about everything we already have.  Which led to Erin's suggestion that we don't buy anything non-consumable in 2013.

Is that even possible?

We weren't sure, but decided that, yes, probably, it was.  Given a bit longer to think about it, we decided the point of the experiment was actually about living with less.  It's not just about money.  It's about being more self-sufficient, less wasteful, having less clutter/bottles/boxes around, etc.

It's not about changing the world single-handedly, nor about martyrdom or instilling fear or guilt about our (and others') choices and actions.  Rather, our year of less will be about bringing more authenticity into our lives.  It will give us the opportunity to align our values with our actions.  We value autonomy and sustainability.  We care about reducing our environmental impact, making wise purchases, and saving for what's really important to us (family, friends, travel, and a future home) -- only using/taking what we need, being grateful for what we have, and trying to leave things a little better than when when found them. 

So there we go.  In 2013, we live with less.  We don't know exactly what this year will bring, but hope that whatever crazy project we undertake, we will achieve one or more of these things:

1. Simplify.  Our lives are busy and complex enough as it is.  We crave a simpler path.
2. Use Less.  We, admittedly, consume more than we need.  We want to understand this better and change what we can.
3. Share More.  We are so fortunate and have far more than what we need. We want to share what we can.

How do we do this?  For starters:

No (wherever possible) capital expenditures (including books -- arghh!).

No takeaway coffees.

No purchased alcohol.
When running out of any household product, rethink the next step.

Etcetera (this list will constantly evolve).