Showing posts with label household. Show all posts
Showing posts with label household. Show all posts

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Frugality or Insanity?


A very heavy basket full of wet laundry, hauled up two sets of stairs and across the parking lot.
Wet socks, painstakingly laid out like a jigsaw puzzle on a sweater thing. (And then being stepped on and messed up!)
Wet shirts and pants hung on hangers from the shower curtain.
Everything else, carefully maneuvered to fit on the drying rack in the bathtub.
All with a fan blowing on them for a solid 12 hours before it's dry. 
All this to save 75 cents? 
Is it worth it? 

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Tooth Brush holder

Again, being painfully practical, I needed a solution to keep C and P's toothbrushes and toothpaste from rolling out of our medicine cabinet. So here's what I came up with.
So simple and it's been working great! Here's all you need:
3 toilet paper tubes
a scrap piece of cardboard for the base
4 pieces of fabric approx. 6" x 6"
hot glue gun

Glue the fabric around the toilet paper tubes and around the cardboard base. The fabric is a little wider than the tubes so just fold the edges inside and glue them down. Then hot glue the tubes to the base. Voila! The variations of this are endless. Unfortunately the tubes aren't quite big enough for adult sized toothpaste, and brushes are too topheavy, but it has solved this problem for me in a simple, cheap, crafty way!


Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Making peace with the laundry beast

This summer our drier went on the fritz. It was making an awful sound and each time I used it I was afraid it was going to blow up or burn up. Since we enjoy a climate with hot sun and dry air, and I LOVE the smell of sun-dried laundry, AND since we had a couple other things needing our financial attention all at the same time, I decided to try only hang-drying our laundry. The only problem with this is that I only had one clothes line and it barely was enough to hold one load of laundry. I never liked the whole "laundry day" thing anyway, which was what I had been trying to make work previously.

So, something had to change. The answer for me was to do one load of laundry each day, except Sunday. If I was caught up I would skip a day or use that day to do something I normally wouldn't pay attention to like curtains or rugs. If I felt behind, I'd do two loads a day. Flexibility is the name of the game, right?

I did this for about 6 weeks and loved it! My goal is always to get it started first thing in the morning, because I tend to forget about laundry - out of sight and out of mind! It gives me the whole day to remember to finish it and put it away. I have to admit there were a few nights when I went out in the dark to collect laundry off the line!

Well, after 6 weeks of the best smelling laundry ever, we were ready to get a new drier (thank you, Craig's list). Now that it's cold outside, I'm glad not to have to hang dry the clothes, but I've kept the same system of about one load a day. It's made doing laundry almost a joy!

How do you  manage keeping your family's clothes clean? Are you an "all in one day", "once a day, every day" or "whenever my baskets are overflowing or we've run out of clean socks" laundry family? I've been each of these types at one point or another!

Who does the laundry in your family? Husband or wife? Do you enlist your children's help? How so?