How I cut the number of soaps I use in half
Why do I have 10 different kinds of soap in my house?
Your House is Your Machine explores a systems-driven approach to home organization and life. If you like what you’re reading, perhaps you can share this with your best friend, your mom, or someone you know who dreams of an organized home.
Sometimes when solving a problem, the trick is to simplify the problem rather than design the perfect solution.
My soap saga is an excellent example of this. Soap can quickly get complicated. Marketers tell us we need a lot of specialized soaps in our homes: For each job, the perfectly customized soap! Following their lead, here’s where I found myself a few years go:
Dish soap
DishWASHER soap
Laundry detergent
Shampoo
Body soap
Bath soap
Hand soap
Face wash
Baby soap
Baby shampoo
That’s a lot of soaps! And if you have each of these 10 soaps, you need to devote space in your brain to knowing when one type is low, refilling the soaps, researching to make sure that scary chemical X you just read about isn’t in each soap, and so on.
My soap-simplification jou…