Guest Posting – Notes From The Laundry Room
This is fantastic! Just when Mr. Money Mustache is starting to get a bit overloaded with answering email questions and comments from readers, volunteer work at the local school, building a stone wall around one of the gardens, starting a new carpentry project in the neighborhood, and trying to write new articles here and there, a generous fan comes along and submits a guest article for me to display.
Today’s article is from an established author from the excellent WikiHow website, with pen name Dvortygirl. She has initiated over 200 articles on that site on subjects ranging from crafty Home Economics to High Tech. She stumbled across MMM from a feature on LifeHacker.
Do YOU like writing about Mustachian Subjects like Money, Efficiency, Investing, or your Own story of Frugality or Badassity? Do you want to share it with a large audience of interesting interested people? If so, feel free to email me with your idea. It is always fun to share with your friends. So here we go. Thanks again Dvortygirl!
Notes from the Laundry Room
Laundry isn’t very interesting, which means that the person doing it has plenty of time to think. For those of us who like to think about saving money, we can find plenty of opportunities to do so that involve clothes and laundry.
Here are some of my favorite ways to economize.
1. Leave your dryer lonely. Did you know there’s no such thing as an Energy Star Dryer? The Energy Star folks say, “ENERGY STAR does not label clothes dryers because most dryers use similar amounts of energy, which means there is little difference in the energy use between models.” Translation: all dryers use a lot of energy. As long as the air is warm and dry enough to make it practical, air dry your clothes on a line or rack. If it’s too cold or humid, if you want to smooth out some wrinkles (many clothes don’t need it), or if you can’t bear the thought of stiff, scratchy towels, give them 5-10 minutes in your dryer while they’re still a bit damp.
2. Find and use a bar of laundry soap. I don’t advocate a return to laborious hand washing, but for things you were going to hand wash anyway, and for treating stains, a $1 bar of laundry soap is priceless, and it can last a year or more. As an added bonus, take a piece of it with you the next time you travel (it’s solid, so no TSA hassle) and wash the same few changes of clothes repeatedly, rather than paying extra and braving the luggage monsters to check a bag.
3. Use used clothes. Yeah, this gets personal, but check your local thrift stores, garage sales and rummage sales, and if you have kids, encourage hand-me-downs. People get rid of all kinds of clothes for all kinds of reasons, including outgrowing them and just not liking the style anymore. And because they want to get rid of the stuff, it costs next to nothing. Wash them when you get them home. Environmental bonuses: you’re not requiring the creation or fabrication of new resources, and you’re diverting some of the enormous stream of used clothing from flooding local markets in third world countries.
4. Read clothing labels before you buy. No, not the labels that say the designer’s name. Read the care labels. Steer clear of things that need super-special treatment like hand washing or (especially) dry cleaning. Or, if you only paid a dollar at a garage sale anyway, try washing a dry clean item by hand or (cautiously) with your regular clothing. Some will run or shrink, but some will fare just fine in the normal wash.
5. Learn some basic mending, at least how to sew a button and how to mend a tear that’s on a seam. If you are your children are shorter than the general population, it’s worth knowing how to hem pants and shirts, too. Often, a minor repair can extend the usable life of a garment significantly.
6. Don’t follow fashion, at least not too closely. The classics can look like a million bucks even as you build your million bucks in the bank. Basics are often easier to care for, too. If you want to dress it up, try the DIY approach and try hacking your fashions yourself. Threadbanger is a great place to go for advice and inspiration.
7. Use fabric napkins, towels, and cleaning cloths instead of paper. It makes for a little bit of extra laundry, but you’re air drying it, and you’re using less disposable paper. Give each family member a fabric napkin they can identify as their own (use different patterns or embellish them). They can use the napkins for more than one meal. For the cleaning cloths, get a pile of cotton terry cloths from your favorite big-box store or janitorial supply place. You can use them in place of many rolls of paper towels and wash them all at once. They can be folded to expose many different clean sides, and they don’t shred or disintegrate on contact with water. I even stick a damp one on my Swiffer mop for spot mopping, rather than buy expensive refills.
The next time you’re doing laundry, use those extra mental cycles to cogitate on how you might economize on laundry, and please use the comments to let us know what you think up.
(Dvortygirl)
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
Those are all good, but the most useful laundry tip for our household has been to wash clothes less. If you work in an office and don’t sweat very much, you can get multiple wearings out of outer clothing items – which saves both in washing and makes clothes last longer. Towels can be hung up after a shower and reused, too. We haven’t been successful with the kids’ clothes yet, since they are so messy (mostly when they eat and brush their teeth), but occasionally they can wear their jeans another time.
I Definitely agree! I said in an earlier article that you only need to wash your clothes when they LOOK or SMELL funny. Some people disagreed in a related discussion forum on Reddit, but they were obviously fools – if you phrase it the opposite way, should you wash clothes when they LOOK and SMELL perfectly clean? No.
My own jeans go about 5-10 wearings between washings, T-shirts 1-2 days depending on physical activities, button-up-shirts 4-10 days since I don’t usually wear those for hardcore bike rides and such, towels in our dry climate are good for a week or two, and kid clothes for the 5-year-old usually last a few days between washings as well. Unless we happen to be playing a rousing family game of “Mud Volcano” in the back garden with the hose, as we did last weekend. When you add all this up, our family of 3 runs the washing machine only once or twice a week, then hangs it all up to dry.
Good advice, but keep in mind that humans suck at detecting their *own* smell. By the time you can smell odors on your own clothing, other people have already smelled them for a while. Having a family, you have a fairly easy way to double-check your funk level. However, a single person should exercise caution when deciding to reuse clothing for multiple days in a row, even if they themselves do not detect any smells. :)
In Armenia it’s common to wear the same outfit several days in a row. It’s amazing and I really wish America was the same.
I too only wash clothes when they get funky. Doing the wash by hand means there is extra incentive to prolong how long you wear something.
“Towels can be hung up after a shower and reused, too.”…for months.
Are there actually anyone who uses a towel only once? I mean do you have one shower and then wash the towel?????
Some modern jeans brands recommend you never (or once every 2 years or so) wash their jeans as they say washing destroys the style…i would never myself go that far but….
This is a late comment I know (I just discovered MMM and am still working through the plethora of posts), but one trick my mom taught me was to change out of your work clothes as soon as you get home (and hang or fold them neatly), and change into a set of “round home” clothes that can be worn for several days until they smell or look funky (or even after that, depending on your spouse’s tolerance for that sort of thing – LOL!). That way work trousers and jackets can be washed maybe once per month (or even less frequently), and tops/shirts can usually be worn 2 or 3 times before washing, depending on the temperature and how active you are at work. Same thing on the weekend… get up and put on your scruffy “round home clothes” and then get changed just before you go out to wherever you’re going (if you go anywhere at all).
This approach has been even more useful since having kids – I have my “spit-up sweater” which I wear whenever I’m at home (even over work clothes in the morning, taking it off literally as I walk out the door), and just wash it once it gets gross – saves getting spit up stains on all my good clothes, or worse – getting spit up on my good clothes and not realizing until I’m at work!!!
I would say that investing in quality clothes is important too. Not necessarily expensive clothes, but clothes that are made well and will last without pilling, fading, stretching, come apart at the seams, and so on.
I read the Everyday Minimalist, and she has the theory that high quality clothing should, in the long run, save you more money than buying larger quantities of lower quality clothing.
For instance, I can spend $15 on a low quality sweater. This sweater stretches and pills in about a year of regular wear, forcing me to buy a new one the next year and drop another $15. I could instead buy a $30 sweater that will last me for eight years (one such item that I have).
So instead of $15 x 8 = $120 spent on cheap sweaters, I can spend $30 x 1 = $30 on one quality sweater that will last me a long time.
Granted, this requires finding high quality, durable clothing which is getting harder and harder to find at non-astronomical prices. It also requires as mentioned in the article buying classic clothing items that won’t go out of style in six months.
MMM has already mentioned that not using the hot water cycle or the dryer will go a long way towards making clothes last as well! Fading and pilling may not be a factor after that.
I agree that it’s helpful to have clothing that lasts. Personally, I find that one of the benefits of buying used clothes is that anything it was going to do (wrinkle, stretch, shrink, fade, pill), it usually has already done so for the previous owner. If it’s obvious that that was the reason somebody got rid of it, I don’t buy that item. There’s plenty more around that might have been culled because it was one thing too many, or because someone gained or lost weight.
And I’ve found plenty of $30 sweaters for a buck or two at thrift stores and garage sales.
“Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.” -Henry David Thoreau
I’m surprised that homemade laundry soap wasn’t mentioned in this article. I can make 5 gallons of homemade laundry soap for about $4 or less and that batch will last me about one year (for 2 adults). I use it for my colored clothes and linens and all rags. I do use store-bought soap for white clothing and white linens though.
We make our own, and calculated it to be 5% the cost of store-bought detergent. It’s basically free, and only requires a small amount of work.
Could you include a link to an article explaining how this is done? I would be interested, as laundry soap can be decently expensive…
Here are the ingredients you’ll need to pick up:
1. Borax ($3.38 at Walmart –in the laundry aisle)
2. Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda (NOT Baking Soda–$3.24 at Walmart)
3. Fels-Naptha Soap Bar ($.97 at Walmart )
4. 5-gallon bucket with lid
5. OPTIONAL: Essential Oil Drops for fragrance (we did not add this, so I am not sure how much it costs)
Grand Total: $7.59 for 640 loads (180 loads in a top-loading machine). That’s a little more than 1 cent a load! And the savings are even greater the next time you make this because the only thing you’ll have to buy is the Fels-Naptha soap bar!
1. Grate the entire bar of the Fels-Naptha soap.
2. Put in a pot with 4 cups of hot water. Stir continuously over medium-low heat until all of the soap flakes have dissolved and melted (about 10 minutes). It should be slightly foamy with no “chunks” or flakes to be found.
3. Fill a 5-gallon bucket half-full of hot water.
4. Pour in the soap mixture. Add 1 cup of Arm & Hammer Washing Soda and 1 cup Borax. Stir. My husband happened to have a paint stirrer that goes on his drill, so that helped. But if you don’t have one of these, just use the end of your mop (or something that can reach to the bottom of the 5-gallon bucket).
5. Fill the rest of the 5-gallon bucket with water until it is full. Stir again.
6. Cover and let it sit overnight.
7. When you open the top up the next day, it should have gelled and thickened. Stir again.
8. Use a funnel to pour the mixture in a used/clean laundry detergent container only HALF full. Fill the rest of the way with water and shake.
Once you’re ready to use the laundry soap, shake it in the container first. Then add:
-5/8 cups for a regular top-loading machine
-1/4 cup for a front-loading (HE) machine
I HIGHLY recommend getting a paint stirrer to put on your drill…trust me. I don’t even use an old detergent bottle, I just leave mine in the five gallon bucket and I have a quart sized rubbermaid bottle w/ my detergent at the wash. I have very sensitive skin, and therefore have to use a free and clear style laundry soap if I buy it, but this stuff doesn’t bother me a bit. Bonus points, it really gets clothes clean. It even gets my husband’s car clothes clean, and that’s saying a lot.
Thank you for this excellent description.
Nice suggestions in your article. I would like to add washing clothes in cold water is also a great way to save money. And to add a little bit to your part about hand washing clothes. I recently purchased this kit to help me wash clothes by hand. It is great. my partner gets filthy dirty every day on his job and I do not want to put his work clothes in my good washer so I hand wash his work clothes.
Another suggestion that I would have to your readers is to look for laundry products like drying racks and clotheslines that are made in America they will do more to boost the us economy than just saving a dollar or two by purchasing a cheap made in China product.
Hanging up clothes to dry, especially if they are not sweaty, is a great way to keep clothing smelling fresh. I have even let my gym clothes air dry as soon as I get back and I can wear them at least twice more before throwing them in the hamper.
It is the bacteria that feeds on sweat that causes the odors–unless you have naturally strong smelling sweat. If you don’t ball them up where the bacteria can breed, clothing stays fresh smelling much longer.
When I’m travelling, I use shampoo to wash my clothes in the hand basin. After my shower, I lay out the damp towel, place my hand-washed clothes flat on the towel, then roll it up (jam-roll-sponge cake style) so that I get a sausage of towel and wet clothes. Then I twist the ends of the sausage in opposite directions to wring it tight. Then unroll it and hang out the clothes. The wrung-towel technique blots more of the water out of the clothes and helps them dry faster.
Obviously if I’m staying in a hotel, I use THEIR towels (use dry towels if there are some spare – they’ll suck more water out of your wet clothes) , and if I’m using my own travel towel, which is synthetic to dry faster – it doesn’t work quite as well but it’s definitely better than not wringing them at all.
On the wash-clothes-less-frequently theme: I agree for labour, environment and wear-and-tear reasons. That’s why why we have socks (you wash the sock, not the shoes) underwear (you wash your undies, not the trousers) and singlets (you wash the singlet, not the shirt). Washing your “smalls” involves less soap, water, drying time etc. Also any stains from sweat, blood etc are hidden from view under your outer shell of clothing, instead of appearing on your clothes.
I put all my little soap ends that are too small to actually use in the shower anymore into a mesh bag that came around a gift of sample size bath products a few years ago, I keep this bag hanging in my shower and use it to scrub hosiery. Then I hang newly clean hosiery in the laundry room clipped to a pants hanger. This way I noly need two pairs of hose because I always have a clean pair on my body and another clean pair drying at home. Takes less than a minute in the shower.
I also love thrift store clothes because if they are gonna stretch, shrink or fade, they’ve already done so…I know anything I buy there has been pre-shrunk, which makes it VERY important to try things on because the size numbers often have NOTHING to do with the actual size.
I love the homemade laundry soap recipe and I’ll be out in a few months, so that will be fun to try.
When buying clothes, consider going heavy on the quick-dry type common for hiking. You can fit a lot more of them in a washer load, they’ll dry overnight just hung over the shower rod with almost no wrinkles. Or if handwashing, they are much easier to handle.