You can wash your clothes yourself indoors. It’s not for the lazy because it takes time and work. It will save you electricity because it uses a lot less electricity than washers and dryers. It also uses less water, so you’ll save a little on your water bill too.

Some people don’t have washers and dryers and must go to a laundromat to wash their clothes. This is a pain because it’s really boring. You can’t just leave your clothes there, so you have to sit there and be bored or try to read a book while you’re waiting for your laundry to wash and dry. Most laundromats charge around $1 or $1.50 per load in the washer and the dryer. You have to supply your own laundry detergent of course.

There are basically 2 benefits to washing your clothes yourself indoors:

1-save money-it’s frugal

2- don’t have to wait around at a laundromat. Can do it at your own time.

But I don’t want to make this sound too easy so here are the disadvantages:

1- is time consuming

2- you have to work at it unlike just throwing a load in a washer (this could be a good thing though if you want to build a good work ethic or want to burn off calories)

3- clothes take a long time to dry indoors, like 2 days.

Hand washing is a good thing if you only have a few items of clothing, a uniform perhaps or your favorite outfit, but don’t want to use the washer and dryer just for a few items. Save water and electricity by hand washing them.

Now if you are really serious about hand washing your own clothes indoors, go to http://www.lehmanbrothers.com and you can find all kinds of neat stuff-like the things they used long time ago before washers and dryers.

You can get a variety of washing boards which remove all those stubborn stains that washers don’t touch.

You can get indoor drying racks-this is really a necessity and a double rinse sink, clothes wringers where you turn a handle to get your clothes wrung out good, as well as other indoor laundry items.

Stock up on these items if you are serious about this and plan to hand wash your laundry indoors long term.

Now if you want to just experiment and try out how it works, do this.

Get 2 of those plastic storage containers. You can get them around $5 or so. One is for washing and the other for rinsing.

Get some clothes, put it in a container which should be in your bathtub, then pour on the water and put in the laundry detergent.

You need something to stir the clothes with. They need to be stirred good or agitated to get them clean.

Then pour out the water and wring out the clothes and put them in the other container which should also be in your bathtub. You can now take the washing container out of your bathtub and keep in the rinsing container. Then fill the container with water and let the soap get rinsed out.

For a good rinse you have to do this twice. Pour out the water, wring out the clothes again, and put them back in the rinsing container with fresh water.

Next, you have to take out the clothes and wring them out again one by one. This is hard to do by hand so that’s why if you want to do this long term, to get one of those close wringers where you can wring them out good just by turning a handle.

Then you need a place to put them to dry. You can put them over your shower curtain (put a towel on the floor it the clothes are dripping) but the shower curtain will only hold so many clothes. So it’s good to have an indoor drying rack. This is unless you live in a place where you can have an outdoor clothes line.

So do this experiment and see if you think it’s worth it to save money and use less electricity and water.

If you think it’s worth it, head over to Lehman Brothers and stock up on some essential laundry items like the clothes wringer, indoor drying rack, and washing boards for clothes with stains.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 6:48 am and is filed under Frugal Mindset, Stretching the Dollar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.