Back to hand washing laundry

Well, its been awhile since I wrote anything, between the holidays and other things I guess i've been neglecting things here.

Our metal roof is finally on. I haven't set up the rainwater harvesting yet, but plan to this spring. Its too cold right now :o). I hate the cold. But the roof is doing wonderfully. Not a few days after we got it on, it snowed. And sure enough, the roof shed the snow very easily. I was so glad that my husband will NOT have to climb up there to shovel snow off again. AND its the last roof we'll ever have to invest in.

Tonight, I got my wonderclean washer out for the first time in awhile. Since getting colder, I admit I've been using my washer more often, well er....all the time actually. 40gal down the drain every load of wash. I can say that I've not used the dryer much at all though AND in fact, my oldest daughter has now started hanging HER clothes up as well. (Could it be because the dryer doesn't work as well as it used to??).

I decided to try the wonderclean in the kitchen. I followed someone else's advice and put it on a drainmat so that when I turned it over to dump out the water, it would just go straight into the sink. It would have worked great, except there was no water to drain!!! The clothes absorbed all of the water. So, I have some experimenting to do with how much water/how much wash to put into it.

In any case, using hot water did make a difference in how clean the clothes got. At first I thought that was wasting propane, heating the water and such. But I only had to use a total of 4 gallons of water, for washing and rinsing combined, and that covered the same sized load as I would probably do in the machine washer using 40gal for washing and another 40gal for rinsing.

And the soap I had to use was so little (one tablespoon/load) that even if it didn't all come out, I wasn't too worried about it.

I was able to put the wringer on the back of a chair and put towels on the floor. When I was all done with everything, I hung the sopping wet towels on the deck to dry in the cold. The clothing I took downstairs and hung to dry in front of our woodstove. And voila, laundry is done.

I'm going to try and just do one small load each day instead of several at a time. That way its not too heavy to carry downstairs either. As for sheets and towels, I may end up doing those in the tub with my feet, then wring dry and hang downstairs. I'm determined to get away from using a washer if I can.

Anyway, the wonderclean worked so well that I really think life doesn't have to be that much harder as a homesteader than it is for me with all the modern ammenities. I think of all the jobs that homesteaders have to do, laundry is one of the hardest, but the wonderclean made that easy. Now the hard jobs will be planting and harvesting, then canning/preserving.

The remaining projects I have yet to do are the solar water heater, and setting up the barrels for rainwater collection. We also need to cut another window in the attic yet for ventilation. With better ventilation, the new reflective metal roof, and the solar screens from this past year, I think we MIGHT actually be able to get through the summer with no a/c.

The longer term projects are going to be building a solar array, and an above ground water cistern to store rainwater longer term.