I have always enjoyed laundry. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t choose to do laundry over, say, having ice cream, but I do enjoy the process of taking dirty stinky clothes and then seeing them all nicely folded and put away.  It’s one reason why the prospect of using cloth diapers didn’t faze me too much.

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This picture makes me smile.  Out of curiousity today, I added up the load amounts on all 21 of the bottles (one not shown, as it’s in use)  I currently have 646 loads of laundry detergent–using their recommended amounts. I personally never use as much detergent as the bottle calls for, though, because–well, if half the recommended amount can clean poop out of diapers, then I think it can also handle normal laundry, don’t you?  Plus, I have about 2/3 of a giant 180 load box I bought at Sam’s Club before I had this stockpile of detergent–that’s an additional (estimated) 119 loads.  So, all together, I have enough detergent for 765 loads of laundry. I also have almost all the ingredients for countless batches of homemade detergent, which I was using to wash my diapers in before we phased out the diaper laundry. I probably won’t make much of that for a while… though now that I think about it, I have about one load worth of that detergent left, too. ;)

Anyway.  What you are looking at is about 2.5 years worth of laundry, (assuming I do six loads a week. That seems like a fair estimate. I do a lot of laundry for just the three of us.) or up to four and a half years if I use half the recommended amount every time.  I might have spent a dollar each for about three or four of those bottles back in the early days of my stockpile. The rest were free after coupons.

Also, that’s the new shelf my hubby added for me.  He is awesome that way.