Last week I issued a "One Week Challenge" around the house. No conventional TP for a full week. Gwen was all for it, since she's been using cloth wipes since day 1. Drew & Lyn were easily convinced after I promised special alien & unicorn TP for them, respectively. DH, well, he liked the theory & cost savings potential, but was a little leery of actually -using- the cloth sheets & only agreed if I made "extra large tissues" for him. Sigh. Whatever it takes, right?
Anyway, 3 days in the the whole crew was HOOKED. Drew & Lyn were even spreading the word about their "super cool" TP to their friends at school. =)
The break down....my guess is that we have a total of 60-75 pieces of cloth toilet paper floating around the house at the moment, including Gwen's cloth wipes, which are still going strong after 2 years of use! The rest was made from flannel I've had for awhile that was just sitting unused in a tote. Dirties are stored in extra wetbags, which, again, I've already had for some time. The only start up purchase I made was 2 vinyl woven baskets to use as TP holders, a whopping $1 a piece at Dollar Tree.
The results thus far...an extra 2-3 loads of laundry a week, which the loads themselves honestly are actually less nasty than some CD loads Gwen's given me to clean in the past. Easy enough to wash, as I've just been doing the same routine for the TP as I've had for the diapers.
The savings...on average between the 5 of us we'd go through 3-5 rolls of TP a week, in part of overusing & Gwen trailing it all around the house. In other words, a total waste of a good $20/month in TP products.
So in using cloth toilet paper, that's an extra $200-250 a year in our pocket in exchange for a few more loads of laundry. Not too shabby, if you ask me!
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