Two years ago my Dad bought us a mobile home to try and help us financially, we had a newborn, and we had just lost my income. We were told that it just needed some new flooring and a "slap of paint". Yea well what me and my husband didn't know is that couldn't be farther from the truth. It needed a new roof, the guest bath was not useable, their were holes in the floors in three rooms, and a lot of the windows leaked to some degree. Looking back I should have put it together that holey floors and leaking windows meant major water damage. Well fast forward a few years and quite a few thousand dollars that we didn't really have and voila you have MOLD. There is a whole entire wall in our bedroom that needed to be tore out and the whole inside of the sheetrock was full of black mold, along with rotted boards. Well we replaced all that and tried to fix the leaking windows and it didn't work, the windows still leak and it has ruined the new sheetrock. Fast forward a tad more and theirs mold underneath our kitchen sink and its BAD, and there's mold in the living room. Finally we reach our breaking point, WE ARE SO DONE. So we don't have great credit and we don't have a huge budget, but were making it work. We found a decent apartment that's not the fanciest some even call them "ghetto" but their mold free and they have central heat and air. Did I mention that in the almost 6 years me and Jon have been together no where we have ever lived has had central heat or air. We are a tad excited I cant even lie. I think the reason the apartments we are moving to are considered sub par is because of the tenant's, a considerable amount of young people live there, put hey I'm YOUNG! And honestly the race of my neighbors is no concern of mine, I don't care if your black, white, blue or green but a pink person would be awesome, that's my favorite color! Besides Jon is biracial, his mom is Guatemalan and his dad is Caucasian.
SOOO... moving on even more. A year or more ago before I started cloth diapering Jon bought me a fancy front loader washer and dryer because I though its what I wanted! Well it turned out to be a horrible mistake, doesn't get clothes very clean and cleans cloth diapers even worse. Oh and did I mention the washer seal is moldy too, the seals are already prone to mold but I'm sure the moldy environment of our house didn't help. Anywho the apartment we are moving to doesn't even have washer and dryer hook ups, so we would either have to use the on site laundry facilities or mooch off of family or friends. Then I started thinking and did some basic math and checked the prices of the washers and dryers at the on site facility and JUST to wash repeat WASH ONLY our clothes and Bella's cloth diapers could easily be $80 a month. Now I know what you're thinking, $80 a month isn't so bad, and its honestly not BUT I have so many better ideas that I could come up with for spending that money. That money could be put in our savings envelope or debt envelope or go towards birthdays or next Christmas. If you cant tell already we follow a Dave Ramsey style zero balance budget and I honestly believe if we didn't follow this system we wouldn't be able to afford to move.
Fast forward again, I did some poking around, found out about portable washers and though I had solved my problems. Well here's the problem with portable washers, they don't hold a lot AT ALL an we typically generate almost two loads of laundry a day, and nice ones are about $200. So while perusing YouTube I saw a video on the sidebar list that said "how to hand wash clothes" and all of the sudden a LIGHT bulb moment happened. I could use a clean (new) plunger to hand wash our clothes in the bathtub! I couldn't believe my scrunchy self didn't think of it sooner! I immediately text my best friend and told her my idea waiting for the "your crazy" reply, but that didn't happen. She said it was minimalism at its finest and she though it was a great idea. Her encouragement gave me what I needed to try a load before my husband got home, I mean if I were to screw up I wanted to be alone. So I threw a load of clothes in the bathtub and got them all wet and "rinsed" them per say. After that I filled the tub with hot water and detergent and plunged my happy heart out, for about 5 minutes then let them soak. I myself was skeptical but when I went back in there after the 30 minutes the water was black, it must have worked! Next I drained the water and rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, then wrung them out all well as possible. The wringing is the only obstacle I have encountered, I cant get the water out as well as a spin cycle and they dripped some. I tried a heavy duty mop bucket and that didn't do much and a wringer is expensive, almost defeating the purpose of me hand washing. The clothes will take longer to dry and we will just have to get used to that and I may have to do smaller more frequent washings, but that's ok. We will have a balcony I can set my clothes racks on to drip dry and then bring them inside to finish drying when they are not dripping wet anymore. The only piece of clothing that took more than 1-2 days to dry was a hoodie but that's to be expected. Our move in date is set a week from today, and I wont know for sure how hand washing full time will be until I'm doing it. After we have settled in for a few weeks and I have a solid routine down I will give y'all an update. Thanks for reading and happy washing!
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