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“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Tightwad Tip-Laundry

First I don't like doing laundry and especially hate folding clothes. Second, I hate spending money to do laundry. So a couple of things to cut down on the amount and the bill. First, wear clothes more than once if you possibly can. If I have to go to town and run a couple of errands very often my clothes have not been worn for very long and I was clean when I put them on, so I hang them up on a hanger and let them air. I have a special place in our bedroom outside the closet that I hang the clothes so that I know they have been worn once and this gives them room to air out. Those are the clothes that I choose first for my next outing. After they have been worn a couple of times then they head to the wash. My husband and daughter do the same thing. This greatly cuts down on the amount of clothes that I wash during the week. I will even do this with work clothes around the farm if I haven't gotten too dirty. For instance, I worked in the garden planting and covering rows. The work wasn't too terribly labor intensive so I will rewear my shirt to do the same today and just put on a different pair of pants since the knees were muddy. Another thing to do is once you are washing use the shortest setting on your machine that you can. Those clothes that were worn to town and don't have any mud or dirt on them or stains, put them on a short setting. The less time your washing machine runs the less electricity you use. Of course, dirty stained outside work clothes need more time to get clean. However, those outfits that you wore for just a few hours each time mostly running errands or visiting friends really don't need that long to get clean. Anyway, those are my tightwad tips for the day. Blessings, Kat

2 comments:

Kelle at The Never Done Farm said...

We do the same here, first of all because to wear an entirely clean set of clothes for each day is wasteful and silly and secondly we just don't have enough work related clothes to make it an entire week. You see I'm a stickler about doing laundry once a week, on Monday*wink*

Another thing we do is use bath towels more than once. I mean really you've bathed and are clean right, so the towel is only collecting water, so why not air dry on a rack and reuse it again?

Some observations I've noticed in doing laundry this way( washing once a week and drying on the line outdoors, or on drying racks inside, are that clothes seem to last longer. You know when using a dryer, all of the lint in the lint screen, well..... that is pieces of your clothing, broken down by repeated washing and drying in machines. Our towels last 4 times longer when we reuse them before washing and hang to dry, rather than use a machine to dry them.

So the savings continues :o)

Blessings,
Kelle

teekaroo said...

I agree. My problem is that I don't have a good place to put the clothes that have been worn once. They end up tossed onto the chair or trunk and it all gets so messy.