According to our grandmothers’ wisdom (and verified on thenewhomemaker.com), Monday is Wash Day. After Sunday’s day of rest, homemakers traditionally took on one of the week’s most difficult tasks: the laundry. Whether you’re disciplined enough to schedule your laundry days or you just do a load or two when you’ve run out of socks and underwear, the following recipe for simple washing powder will make the task more fun. This laundry detergent is simple to make, saves you money and smells heavenly.

Having a garden and putting by our own food is the ideal for which many of us strive. It’s the optimal way to save money on groceries. The food source doesn’t get any more local, the cost is low, the flavor is incredible and the carbon footprint is not much more than a muddy footprint on your doormat.

How many M.I.T. engineering Ph.D.s does it take to repair a dishwasher? In the case of a balky Maytag at Eric Wilhelm’s house in Oakland, Calif., one doctorate sufficed. After a plastic wheel on the dishwasher’s upper rack broke off of its assembly, Wilhelm faced a classic consumer conundrum. The same plastic part had broken and been replaced three times—and now the warranty had ended. Considering this history and Wilhelm’s mounting frustration, repairing the 3-year-old appliance seemed marginally less logical than buying a new one.

Yes, we live in a throwaway society. But a growing band of old-school tinkerers and new-school modders are rediscovering the joy of fixing what’s broken.

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