Making it vs Buying it

Psst! The key active ingredient is…koala

Although I’m no toilet paper snob and have actual issues with designer toilet paper, I’m not sure how comfortable I am at the thought of having to make my own. But then again, there’s only one (sensible)place for used toilet paper to go, right? So why not try and cut down the cost of it? After all, there’s nothing more annoying than being the ONLY person in the house-share that ever buys the stuff.

So, I Googled “how to make your own toilet paper” and if this is not a joke, here’s what you need :

a blender
human hair (????!!!)
used newspaper
Elmer’s white glue
bleach
toothpicks
well water

VERDICT: Do I even need to say it? Unless you’re doing this purely to save the environment and to kill alot of time, BUY IT.

Note: When you’re 70 shades darker than your natural color, it’s time to invest in soap.

Students are notorious for being bad at doing laundry. Whilst a lucky few simply bring theirs home for their poor families to deal with over the weekends, international students often don’t have that luxury and have sort it out themselves.

With billions of dollars pumped into the marketing of laundry products a year, I do wonder whether images of beautiful families in impossibly white clothes means that the product they’re advertising is  better at removing stains than plain ol’ super market own brand. Surely the active ingredient that removes the dirty stuff is all the same, right?

So here I am again, typing “home made laundry detergent” into Google and to my surprise, quite a lot of people have actually looked into this.

According to this krafty homemaker, "The cost of making the above recipe of laundry soap was .71 cents.  That was amazing to me!  With this 2 gallon size recipe you will have enough to do 64 loads of laundry.  That translates to about .01 cent a load."

VERDICT: Make it! 

Cats make excellent musical book ends

You’ve just spent a fortune on textbooks for the year and now you need to fork up the money for a book shelf?! Whilst they’re not extremely expensive things (depending on how picky you are), don’t you wish sometimes these things were just free?

This website suggests that milk crates can work just as well. Whereas those Swedish furniture people with the blue and yellow logo (they don’t need any more publicity) are saying you can get one for quite a reasonable price if you’re happy/capable of putting it together yourself.

Verdict: This one’s a tough call. Although milk crates are free, I’m not sure it can hold the weight of all you brainy people’s books… but then that blue-and-yellow-logo'd Swedish shop can charge quite a bit for a large book shelf… I’m going to go for… BUY IT- but remember you can probably get a cheap one second hand on gumtree/craigslist/freecycle etc if you look hard enough. 

Home-made bacon; might not taste as good as it looks

Yeah, this guy teaches you how to make your own bacon… first thing you’ll need, a pig!

VERDICT: No… or as Mansoor says, "Just don’t."