Frugal Friday - Cleaning Rags

Mr. Right and I closed on our house this past Tuesday. It was a foreclosure, built in 2005. Unlike most of the foreclosures we looked at, this one was in relatively good shape. We're having to hire a carpet cleaner, and Mr. Right and his father had to make a few minor plumbing repairs. Beyond that its all cleaning and painting.

Because something is broken in my head (I'm your friendly neighborhood germophobe blogger), once I clean the other people's dirt and germs out of the house - I'm not going to wash the rag and risk keeping them around. I'm giving the house a good scrubbing and then the rags are going promptly into the garbage.

I certainly don't want to go out and buy rags that are just going to going to get thrown away, so I'm acquiring these cleaning cloths in a couple of standard and one creative way.

Mr. Right collects t-shirts. Not the souvenir kind that you get on vacation (I'm a reformed former Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt collector), but the cheap t-shirt kind. You know the ones you get for free when you participate in a charity event. Not to mention the kind that sell for $0.50 at the thrift store. Only he wears them so much you wouldn't even give a quarter for them. I'm taking this excellent opportunity to assist him in weeding out the collection (he honestly has at least 100 t-shirts, many that either have holes or red clay mud stains, or both).

I'm also going to tear up a few towels that probably should have been retired a long time ago. He has about 10 nice white Egyptian cotton extra large bath towels. Then shoved in the back he has about 4 or 5 towels that probably were in their prime in the 1970s. They never get used and have lost their absorbency, making them just perfect for scrubbing the sink in my new kitchen.

My favorite kind of rag, however, is in limited supply. My mother was cleaning out her basement, excited about getting to give me my stuff and free up room down there, and came across old cloth diapers that she use to use on my sister and I. She saved them from one child to another and then just packed them away. We ripped them up and made them into the perfect sized rag. But I'm not going to tell Mr. Right their original use. He'll probably have wanted to frame them and keep them forever.