The homemade laundry detergent that I made from Michael Nolan’s blog post has been working exceptionally well! Here’s my experience so far:

• General Laundry: The lack of perfumes and fragrances are rather shocking. You lean in to sniff and there isn’t anything there. Not having overdone fragrances nearly brings on a reflexive search, very much in the vein of “I must not have a good grip on this sock…” and to be honest, it feels cleaner now than it did before, no odd someone-else-thought-this-smelled-nice fragrance just malingering after a wash. I appreciate it.
• Extreme Laundry: Doubling what I normally use and using HOT water, this preparation actually outperformed Liquid Tide and removed not only fresh oil stains but older really set-in oil stains. There are two runners in our kitchen that are for comfort and to hide a oopsy-daisy burn-mark on our kitchen carpeting. Yes, I said it. Kitchen Carpeting. The previous owners were lazy and old. There is hardwood floors underneath but we’re too terrified to actually look for the fear that once we pull up the carpet, we’ll have a $5000 rehab job on the flooring that will need to be done.
• Big-Batch Laundry: That is coming today, as soon as I get home and strip the slipcovers off of our white Living Room couch. There is a LOT of fabric in that deal and I’m going to take it down to the laundromat where they have the fancy 50 pound front-loading industry-sized washing machines and use half-a-cup of the cleaning solution on it with HOT water. That should fix it’s wagon. I’ll write an update to see if the fancy-powder-of-happiness can power out some of the odd stains and marks on the slipcover.

Between Michael Nolan and Lifehacker’s Blog I find so many neat ideas and clever tips that it makes me dizzy! It’s so wonderful when things like this go so very well, to say nothing about the frugality of it all! Bravo!