Living More Simply: Dishwashing

Ah the dish washing chore. People around here, ok I, despise washing dishes. I thought that the dishwasher was God's gift to me, and people like me. Until I did some math and some real evaluating.

Have you ever noticed how much work a dishwasher really is? Really unless you have that stellar reputation of person who rinses and loads the dishwasher the very second after the dish is dirty, you have to scrub your dishes before they go in the dishwasher, or as everyone has witnessed from time to time the entire load ends up with crummy yucky stuff plastered to it.

Now that alone, seems like extra work to me. Usually if I've rinsed my dishes well enough to put them in the dishwasher I might has well have added the soap and they'd be clean by the time they got there! Seems like I just wasted time!

After pondering that, I started looking at all those things I cannot wash in my dishwasher. My pans. aren't the pans the worst part of the dishes? Couple that with the fact that most pans, especially those with any kind of non-stick coating, are not dishwasher safe, so if you are putting these things in the dishwasher you are voiding your warranties and not guaranteeing the safety of your pots and pans. The cast iron that I use often, can't be dishwasher-ed unless I want to re-season them every time I cook. Not a real useful thing.

Looking around at that I started wondering if there was more that I wasn't seeing. We stopped using the dishwasher and started washing ALL of our dishes by hand. I mean I was essentially doing that anyways! We stuck a towel on the counter and used that to lay dishes out to dry and after a month, lo and behold our electric bill was TWENTY DOLLARS cheaper! I never in my wildest dreams thought that the dishwasher could possibly eat up that much money!

After a few months of watching our electric bill being consistently cheaper, my husband had an assignment for his environmental science class to measure the amount of energy you used on a daily bases for something like four days. Now I had no idea you could actually calculate this total! I know I must be blonde right? (actually red-head, worse than blonde!) We did the math our dishwasher eats up 120 volts at 8.5 amps, meaning it eats up 1020 watts (volts times amps) while it's running.  If I did the other math properly (hours of use times current cost of electricity) with running the dishwasher once a day (about an hour) it eats approximately 17 dollars or electricity a month, not including the gas to heat the water it uses. So my totals were not that far off!

Looking at the hand washing method, I can safely assume that the amount of energy to heat three to five gallons of water that I use while hand washing (and sometimes used while rinsing and loading the dishwasher anyways) is significantly less than the dishwasher eats up. While I can't calculate for the water usage as we don't pay for water where we are at currently, I still would guess that it doesn't cost as much because I was using the water to rinse the dishes before they went into the dishwasher anyways. All in all for our family washing the dishes by hand is far simpler than washing them with the machine. As an added bonus my dishes have never been cleaner!

Now I'm not saying go out and tape off your dishwasher, never use it again. That would be crazy! But, if you are interested in living with less work and using less energy, it might be time to evaluate your dishwashers actual potential. Are you getting the bang for your buck? Turns out, we weren't!

Combining and Condensing: Baby Clothes Edition

Over the past few months we as a family have been condensing and ridding ourselves of the excess stuff that has accumulated just about everywhere we look.

The other day I decided to tackle the baby clothes pile. We regularly sort through toys  and remove excess toys from the bin, but the baby clothes get a little overwhelming. Every month or so I'm sorting new clothes in and out of their dressers since my girls are so little and my system my lovely system, falls dreadfully short. Here is just one example of how:

This photo is of all the clothes that my kiddo's grew out of that should have been in the hands of someone else in need, some of them over 1 year ago. There are actually six boxes under that pile!

When you look at that pile, you might think that my girls must be running around naked right now. Nope, in fact, they both have boxes of growing into clothes waiting for them still and dressers still annoyingly packed to the brim.

But today, I am laying out for you my system.

We are blessed to have several families giving us some amazing clothing and we hardly ever have to buy clothes for our girls. But if we were to keep everything we get right off the bat my girls would wear a new outfit every single day (some of them I really wouldn't like!) and still not make it through all the clothes before they grew out of that size.

So we start as soon as we get a new set of clothes, We go through all the clothes with our girls in mind, would I ever consider putting my child in this shirt? If no it goes in the blessing pile, if yes it goes in a box for them to grow into. When it comes to my kiddo's since they are born in different seasons I have to watch what I keep and save because chances are if I'm sorting their clothes they won't transfer over to the next kid!

I then go through the keep pile again and make sure that everything will be worn, and that it fits into the box, I only allow myself to keep 1 box of each size (sometimes less than that!) and it has to work for both girls! Once that is finished we determine where the blessing box is going. Sometimes, unfortunately, we can't find a family that needs them and in that case it goes to the nearest Salvation Army, but we do try first to see if there is a family that can use the clothing.

When I am dressing the girls and I find that clothes don't fit, they get tossed into a bag hanging in the closet to be sorted the same way as the new clothes. I re-evaluate every item once again so that we are not storing useless items. Since we plan on having more children, I keep clothing after the youngest as well albeit in much lesser quantities.



About every two months I do a massive dresser dump and I sort, clean up, and size up their dressers. anything that's too small goes into the evaluate bag all the stuff that fits gets neatly folded and returned to it's drawer and the box of clothes to be grown into next moves into the dresser and becomes the  box for the set of clothes coming out.

Does it seem like a lot of stuff and sorting? Yeah it does to me too!! That is why I've limited myself so much that 6 months of clothing they have grown out of literally fits in one box now! The more we go through things the more I am realizing how little of their clothing actually gets worn! Why do I hold onto sixty shirts when my daughters will wear the same five over and over?

Do you have a system for your kids clothing? Share it!

Like this post? Stay tuned more condense and combine articles are coming!

My Natural and Green Laundry Routine

I promised I would share with you how I keep my diapers clean and sanitary. Really I do all of my laundry approximately the same as my diapers so this is my “kill two birds with one stone” post.

First of all, I can’t stand all of the nasty chemicals and scents etc. that are in commercial laundry detergent/ products. We have been ridding our lives of everything chemically loaded why should we coat our clothes in them?

We separate out our clothes pretty simply. Clothes and Diaper covers go together and Diapers, wipes and rags go together. The clothes and diaper covers are washed in cold/cold cycles to preserve clothes and water resistance. Diapers, wipes and rags are washed in hot/cold cycles to sanitize.

We use Charlie’s Soap as our laundry detergent because it is naturally derived and rinses clean. It has no added scents or well anything really. It gets our clothes beautifully clean without anything added but . . .We have hard water. . Bad, nasty, difficult water that threatens to turn all of our clothes into burlap. Water softeners are expensive, one thing I realized, they are all essentially salt. So rather than spend a fortune on water softeners I decided to spend 59 cents and buy a can of salt. I now throw in about a teaspoon of salt in every load and BAM. No more hard water. So far our clothes are softer, the diapers are feeling more and more comfortable on the babies and I haven’t noticed any ill effects on our clothes. Every once in a while I will use vinegar in the rinse cycle as well as a fabric softener and in cloth diapers as sanitizer. Most of the time however I forget the vinegar, the washer doesn’t normally give me warning when the rinse cycle comes up.

Stains if treated quickly can usually be removed by one of three methods, I either 1. Let them soak in the sink and swish them around a few times before throwing the item in the washer (normally stain is pretty well gone when I throw it in the wash) 2. Rubbing a bit of baking soda into the stain to scrub it out or 3. This awesome stain remover made from ¼ cup of dish soap, 2-3 tbsp of vegetable glycerin, and about ½ cup of water mixed in a spray bottle this stuff rocks!

The one difference in the diaper loads is that we need to disinfect the diapers regularly as to not spread bacteria between the kids. To cloth diaper loads I add 10 or so drops of Tea Tree oil and about once a month I add a ¼ to ½ cup of lemon juice to sanitize and bleach them, leaving them to soak for about a half hour. This keeps our diapers fresh and mostly stain free. If I had the ability to line dry them this would accomplish all of this in one as sunlight is a natural disinfectant and bleaching agent!

When we pull things out of the washer Diaper Covers and Wet Bags, Wool items and Gentle Items (I.E. Bra’s) get thrown over the clothes line in the laundry closet the rest get thrown in our dryer with dryer balls I made with this tutorial from Kelly at ImperfectHomemaking. 

We usually fold the clothes when they come out of the dryer because I have nowhere to store unfolded laundry, but a lot of the time I really wish I had somewhere to toss it instead!!

Well that’s it, our lovely laundry routine! I hope you enjoyed our tour!