So March is here, and your spring cleaning is well underway. Or at least you’ve started thinking about it, right? One of the first things that people often do when bitten by the cleaning bug is rush to the store for all sorts of supplies. Spray bottles full of cleaners, organizing bins, baskets, racks, shelves, carpet cleaning machines… the whole process might help you end up with a clean house, but it can also leave a good-size dent in your wallet.
What can you do differently? Well, first things first: Get rid of as much clutter as you can, before you start cleaning or organizing anything. The less stuff you have to deal with, the easier it will be to clean, corral, and store it all. And the easier it will be to keep everything clean. If you get rid of everything that’s no longer useful to you and your family, you might end up not needing all those extra storage bins and gizmos after all.
But even after we get rid of all the extraneous stuff, most of us still need some sort of storage and cleaning supplies. And that’s where thinking outside the big box store comes in handy. Thrift stores and Craigslist are full of organizing supplies that could be the perfect solution. Sometimes you have to be creative – imagine those dingy shelves with a fresh coat of paint, or those wire baskets with liners made of foam board and pretty wrapping paper or shelf liner. Organizing trays are usually very inexpensive at thrift stores, and they’re perfect for containing all of the little things that end up in drawers in kitchens and bathrooms. Plastic storage drawer towers are perfect for storing toys, craft supplies and small tools. Our LEGO collection lives in a great drawer set that I got at Goodwill for five bucks – all it needed was a scrub in the bathtub and it was as good as new, for a fraction of the price. Just about everything we use for storage in our house was secondhand when we got it, and some of it needed to be reinvented a bit and spruced up in order to make it work for us. But it all cost very little.
Even our carpet steamer was a Craigslist find, for ten dollars. It works perfectly, and the water I dump out of it is just as brown as it would be if I had spent $200 on a brand new carpet cleaner.
There’s all sorts of marketing out there designed to convince you that in order to have a clean, organized house, you need to spend big bucks. But with a little clutter-busting, creativity, and old-fashioned elbow grease, your house can look great without having to add an extra line to your budget for cleaning and organizing supplies.
Frugal Babe is a mid-30s American wife and mama who has been careful with money since childhood and loves the flexibility that her frugality has given her. She is the face behind the Frugal Babe website and a contributor to the CareOneCredit.com blog.
