I don’t own a washing machine. Well, yes I do have a Wonderwash, which is a hand-powered washer often used on camping trips. I can do small loads of laundry in it and it works just fine, but at some point you get a little tired of that. ;) It only works when the weather is somewhat decent, for starters. I have to take the laundry through the wringer outside and hang it to dry, also outside, so on rainy days the deal is off. Lately I have been taking my laundry to the gas station every now and then. Yep, you read that correctly! Some gas stations here in the Netherlands nowadays have laundry facilities, isn’t that funny? I drop off my laundry, go grocery shopping and when I come back about 30 minutes later the laundry is done.
On average I have one load of clothes laundry a week that I get done that way, and every other week one for the bedsheets. Perhaps you think that is very little, just one load per week, but often I wear the same clothes when I’m at home: a pair of jeans and a comfy black sweater. ‘Home clothes’ I call them. I discovered that when you have a woodstove in a Tiny House, it’s best to wear dark coloured clothing that can get dirty. You get soot on your hands really quickly and now I can just rub my hands off on my black sweater and it doesn’t bother me. And if I accidently swipe my handsaw past my jeans when I’m sawing wood for the stove, no biggie when wearing an old pair of jeans. When I get visitors or go out I wear something decent, of course, but mostly as soon as I get home I change into my home clothes. That’s just fine! And it saves me a lot of laundry ;)
Other than that, I wear clothing multiple days and won’t make a fuss about it. You don’t have to wash jeans that often anyway, did you know that? Just hanging it out to air for a day is often enough. Even the big bosses in the jeans industry say you shouldn’t wash your jeans so often, it is a waste of water and the fabric gets damaged. The looks improve if you don’t wash them at all the first 6 months. I can understand if that’s a bridge too far for you though. But we really don’t have to wash our clothes after having worn them for just a day. What is that with us, why have we become so freakishly clean in the last couple of decades? All these detergents that end up in the sewers are also very bad for the environment. So please just wash a little less, use biodegradable detergents and sometimes just hang your clothes outside to air instead of washing them. Just try it!
During the past few weeks the weather has been dry a lot, fine weather to hang my laundry outside. But every pro has its con. I looked in my water tank yesterday and discovered that it is emptying out rapidly. Darn! All righty, let’s have some rain now please! Hahaha us silly humans, we’re never content, right? I also noticed some sediment on the bottom of the tank. It would be great if we could have a couple of days of heavy rain, so I can empty and clean it out. I’m sure that will work out sometime this spring though. I wonder if the hole in the top of the tank where the filter hangs in the tank is big enough for me to fit through. Am I thin enough? It would be handy if I could crawl right in. Put on my bathingsuit and go. Brr…
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