Tag Archives: frugal living

Washing dishes – save time or money?

frugal strategies,

>>hi avivah! i am assuming that you probably have dealt with this question before, but i have a question about frugality of time. since reading your blog, i have become more aware of being frugal with all of my resources- space, energy, money, and time. so, the most recent question has to do with being frugal with time- how do you balance buying disposables- if you do at all- with choosing carefully how to spend your time? i have a few children of dishwashing age, but not enough to deal with the overwhelming amount of things that need to be washed. also, having constant piles in my kitchen stresses me out and limits my workspace in a room that is already hot and crowded. so, i am trying to weigh spending money on disposable cups, plates, etc. with making better choices about how we spend our money. any advice?? <<

I’m going to first link some of my past posts on related topics that I think will be helpful.  My kids do the dishes – here is our chore schedule from this past year (it’s time to make a new one for the coming year).  Two of the four oldest really don’t like this part of the schedule, and can’t wait for me to change the chore chart for this year.  But even when they weren’t doing dishes, I hardly used disposables at all.

Here is how I generally organize our house cleaning. This was written two years ago so some of the specifics are different now since we shifted chores around and took into account the kids’ requests for how they wanted to do things, but you’ll get the basic idea.

But in the end, you have to decide what your priorities are.

Practically speaking, remember that you can gradually cut back on your use of disposables – you don’t have to go cold turkey!  It might be too much to totally stop using disposables right away, so try it for your smallest meal of the day.  Or you can use paper plates for meals but use regular cups (or vice versa), or use disposables during the week and dishes on Shabbos (or vice versa).  Start to cut back on your use of disposables gradually.  It’s about progress – slow and steady wins the race.  Start small, and when that has become natural and part of your routine, you can add something else small.

It’s really how you want to spend your time that you have to determine.  Don’t mentally overwhelm yourself before you even start by piling on the work!  You know yourself.  If you can’t stand a mess and you don’t think you can give your kids at least part of the responsibility for dishwashing, then maybe you should focus your money saving efforts somewhere else. (I’m sure your kids will be happy if you ignore my suggestion to get them more involved in cleaning.  My kids came home this past year from their friends’ home – the ones they always told me did much fewer chores than they did – and announced that because the mother spoke to me, now the kids are washing the dishes.  It’s amazing that her kids still smile at me when they see me! :lol:)   There are lots of areas you can save money in and it’s overwhelming to try to work on them all at once.  It’s definitely true that the more you do for yourself, the more you save, but we all have limitations of time and energy.

Avivah

How to dry clothes on clothesline

frugal strategies, homemaking, , ,

I don’t know why, but every time I feel inspired to write about hanging laundry outside there’s something to keep me from doing it.  At the beginning of the summer it was thunderstorms every night.  We haven’t had any rain for a couple of weeks, but now I have a huge mound of dirt covering my yard right under my clothesline from the excavation of our new patio area, so for the last few days (and presumably more than just another few to come), I’ll be using my dryer.

But times like these are actually exceptions for us once the weather is warm.  I used to hang laundry outside year round when living overseas – I didn’t have a dryer until right before my fifth child was born.  In the winter I was very aware of the weather – when the sun shone, my priority was getting my laundry out right away to take advantage of it.  When it was rainy for a few days, I’d hang the clothes inside.  

Then I moved back to the States where our rental home had a dryer but no clothesline.  While I appreciated the convenience of a dryer, I missed hanging the clothes outside and finally asked dh last year to put up a clothesline for me. I’d tried two or three different drying racks over the years but found them flimsy and their holding capacity was so small that when I used them I wasn’t sure if they were a  help or hindrance.  I hung some things on hangers indoors, and while it lessened my dryer usage, it wasn’t very practical for small items. (I found a solution to this several months ago, though – you can clip small items onto hangers with clothespins and it uses the space very efficiently.)

So here are some tips for how to hang your clothes on the clothesline.  They may be obvious to many of you, but they weren’t all obvious to me and they sure aren’t obvious to my kids! 

– To start with, elevate your basket of wet laundry so that you’re not unnecessarily bending repeatedly and wasting energy – I put mine on the Little Tikes kiddie picnic table we have in the yard.

– Make sure you have lots more clothespins than you think you’ll need.  They disappear quickly.

– Sharply shake your clothes made of a material that holds wrinkles before hanging them so that they dry wrinkle-free – like denim skirts. 

– Hang clothing so that when it’s dry the mark of the clothespins were isn’t visible: hang shirts upside down or on hangers, skirts at waist, pants at the cuff.  If you’re using a dryer rack, place items so that the dryer line isn’t in the middle of them. 

– To avoid fading, turn dark clothing inside out.  I learned about the bleaching power of the sun the hard way when I did my first load of laundry in Israel as a seminary student.  I hung my dark cotton tops on the clothing rack, and when I went out to bring them in, I found the sun had bleached the half facing it lighter than the side not facing it.  Also, hang the item so that it’s evenly exposed to the sun, not like what I did. 

– On the positive flip side, the sun is a wonderful whitener!  I schedule my laundry washing so that we hang the light loads first, when the sun is strongest.   If I get busy or go out for hours, it doesn’t matter if they end up hanging for hours.  Then I hang the darks in the later part of the day, when the sun isn’t shining directly on my clothesline for hours.  If something has a stain, hang it so that it’s facing the sun.

– If your neighbors will see your hanging laundry, for privacy’s sake hang undergarments on an inner line, and large things like sheets and towels on the external lines.  Try to be sensitive to what they’ll see from their window when you decide where to hang your clothesline – we put ours to that it runs parallel to the fence between us and our immediate neighbor.  Other neighbors don’t have to look at it, and because of the positioning of our neighbor’s windows, it’s not something that ruins their view of the outdoors, either.

– Here’s a tip I recently learned about but haven’t yet had a chance to try because of the patio preparations.  Before you hang up your clothes, see if you can tell what direction the wind is blowing in.  When you identify that, hang your clothing so that you’re only pinning one side to the line, and the air will blow through the clothes and dry them superfast.  (To clarify, imagine you’re hanging a pillowcase: instead of clamping both parts of the opening together so that it’s hanging closed, put a clothespin on each end but not on both layers –  does that make sense?)

– Some things will dry kind of crunchy, like towels.  You can run clothes after they are mostly dry through the dryer for 5 – 10 minutes to remove that, if it bothers you.  I don’t care about towels but I do care about scratchy cloth diapers on my little ones’ bottoms, so usually cloth diapers go in the dryer. 

Why bother with the effort of hanging your clothes?  Well, using free solar energy to dry your clothing instead of paying the power company for the same result is a frugal thing to do!  I suppose you’re getting some exercise, too.  But for me, it’s more than that.  I really enjoy hanging clothes outside.  It may seem that I’m spending time on something that I could do more quickly with the help of an appliance, but while I’m hanging the laundry, I’m enjoying the air, the sun, the sounds of the birds….It’s a time that I can combine doing what I need to do while being able to relax and be more mindful, to think instead of rushing from one thing that needs to be done to the next.  Time to breathe deeply and enjoy the world around us, to slow down without feeling guilty, is something every busy mom can benefit from on a regular basis!

Avivah

Are kids embarrassed by frugality?

frugal strategies, parenting,

>>Also, something else I was wondering… My son right now is only 2 years old, but I know I grew up with a frugal family and I was embarassed of it.  Do your kids have a similar mindset to you in terms of natural stuff and frugality, or do they get embarrassed about it? How do you keep your kids proud of what you’re doing and not embarrassed that their mom is one of ‘those moms’ :roll:; like I felt when I was a kid?  Is living your kind of lifestyle a little more accepted (where you live) than it was (where I grew up), apparently?<<

I grew up without much money and I always felt less than, so I know what you mean.  When I was younger I planned to make sure my kids had everything that everyone else (plus!) so that they wouldn’t feel bad to be different or have less.  I attributed my negative feelings as a kid to being poor.  But that’s not actually the root of the feeling – it’s an insecurity about who you are and what you do that you convey to your child that they pick up on, not if you are just like everyone else.  If you are confident about what you do and present your choices to your family (or anyone else) matter of factly, it makes a huge difference in how you and what you do are perceived.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that even those who do things just like everyone else also have kids who are embarrassed by them.  So being ultra conservative and conformist isn’t the answer to having kids who are embarrassed by you.  Actually, I think it’s when parents put a high value on being like everyone else that it becomes a lot more important to the kids, and those kids are much more likely to be embarrassed by any perceived differences than kids raised with the idea that it’s a value to live with integrity.

I don’t label myself as a ‘natural’ or ‘attachment parenting’ person.  The things I do are part of who I am, but they aren’t my identity.  I’m a middle of the road person, and if you were to look at me you wouldn’t see visible differences between me and anyone else.  (Anyone who knows me in person is welcome to disagree in the comments section :)).   Why would anyone look at me and know I spent 1/4 – 1/2 of what the same size family spends on food?  People don’t know by looking where you buy your clothes, if it’s at the super duper sales, at a thrift store, or at the beginning of the season in overpriced stores.  And if they learn that you have a great quality life for a lot less than what they think it’s necessary to spend, most people would be interested and positive about that, not hostile.

I’ve said before that frugality isn’t about doing without, but about living within your means while making choices about how you spend your money that are valuable to you.  We make choices and that’s how I explain things to my kids.  I don’t feel apologetic that there are many people in the world that have a lot more money than we do.  We have a great quality life and I constantly communicate my feeling to my kids that we’re so blessed to have all that we have (not just material things, but quality of life things).

Kids tend to have a lot of social insecurity since they are in the process of figuring out who they are and where they fit in. I think it helps a lot that I homeschool, so my kids aren’t constantly exposed to the judgments and assessments of immature peers – it’s that ongoing exposure that creates a lot of insecurity.  My kids haven’t internalized the belief that if you do anything different from everyone else, that something is wrong or shameful about you.

My kids aren’t embarrassed by me, but not because I made it my goal to keep them from feeling that way.  We spend a lot of time together and they respect who I am and what I do; I think the feeling of respect is the core of why I don’t have this issue.  They like me (well, most of the time – less when I’m reminding them to wash the dishes!), and I like them.

As far as if my lifestyle is perceived more positively here than somewhere else – I can’t say.  Maybe.  In my opinion, it’s not so much about how people view your lifestyle as how they view you.  As I said, I don’t wear the different choices I make on my sleeve, and I generally find people to be quite positive when I do discuss choices that I’ve made that are outside of the norm (eg homeschooling).   While I think it’s less about the choice and more about the individual, if I were in a community that was rigid and judgmental, I’d undoubtedly have a different experience.  So I’m grateful to live in the community I do, which is wonderful!

Avivah