Are you prepared to handle Mount Washmore?

My week and a half without a functioning washing machine ended Monday afternoon. Let me tell ya, you really learn appreciate the conveniences of modern life when you have to do laundry for six people by hand! I'm glad that I faced this little challenge when I still had hot water flowing from from the tap and power to run the dryer.

This caused me to put some thought to the essentials you need to do your family's laundry in an emergency scenario. Clean laundry might not be your first concern during TEOTWAWKI, but I guarantee that you will be thankful to have a plan in place.

Breathing Hand Washer
Image from lehmans.com

Basic List of Laundry Supplies:

1. Water - Do you have enough water stored to do laundry in an emergency? I know that I don't, but I hope to remedy this problem in the next few months. I do, however, have some natural bodies of water nearby. If I collected water from these sources, ran it through a rudimentary filter to catch sediment, and then boiled it, I could use it for my laundry. Sounds like a hassle, doesn't it?  
2. A large pot or kettle - You need to be able to heat the large amounts of water it takes to clean your clothes. I plan on using my water bath canner.
3. A way to heat water - I hope you've already thought about how you will cook your family's food during an emergency. Woodstove, outdoor grill, butane stove, whatever - the same thing can do double duty and heat water for your laundry. Just make sure you have enough fuel on hand to do the job. Of course if you are relying on some tiny little camping stove, it might not be capable of heating huge kettles of water.  
4. A three month supply of laundry detergent - Track the amount of detergent you use over the course of three months, then make sure you have that amount on hand at all times. Don't forget to rotate your stored detergent since it does technically expire. A quick Internet search revealed that it lasts 9 months to a year if it is unopened. 
5. A "washing machine" - When I washed all my family's laundry by hand, it was literally with my hands in hot soapy water. It got the job done, but I was left with tired, waterlogged hands at the end of it. A minimal investment in a plunger-type hand washer would have made my life so much easier. I washed my clothes in my laundry sink. You might set aside a couple of clean five gallon buckets for this purpose if you do not have a dedicated laundry sink. 
6. A wringer - This is a more pricey investment, but key to a more enjoyable laundry experience. Otherwise you will have to use your hands to wring out excess moisture from your wet laundry and I can assure you from experience that you will not find wringing multiple pairs of jeans or a mound of towels to be fun. Lehman's sells two wringers ("good" and "best")and you can attach them to a 5 gallon bucket, chair, or other hard surface. 
7. Somewhere to hang clothes to dry - An outdoor clothesline or indoor drying racks. Check out all the options that Lehman's has. No, this post was not sponsored by Lehman's! I just really like them. :)

For extra credit: 

• Store a one year supply of laundry detergent. You might consider storing the ingredients for my homemade powdered recipe as it is both cheaper and more compact to store. 
• Buy a real off-grid washing machine, if you have the funds and the place to store it. I don't!

You'll note that I haven't addressed ironing. That's because I don't iron if I can possibly help it! If ironed clothing is important to you, Lehman's does has a selection of irons you can use off the grid.

Have you ever had to wash clothes by hand for an extended period of time? What are your must-haves to do laundry in an emergency situation? 

Thursday Morning Miscellany

• I broke my washer last Friday.

There is a 3" slit in the gasket 

I had an underwire bra go amok and slash a huge hole in the door gasket. It's a freak accident that is going to cost me $250 and  a week and a half without a functioning washer. In the meantime, what am I going to do about our laundry? 

I decided to wash it all by hand. 

I'm spending lots of time here

I've got detergent, plenty of hot running water, and even a dryer. I thought that there was no reason why I shouldn't be able to take care of it. Well, several days in, it's apparent that washing laundry for six people by hand is very tedious. I need to invest in a few simple tools that will make the job easier should I have to wash laundry by hand in the future. Something to agitate the laundry would be nice, and something else that would wring out water is essential. My laundry remains so wet after I wash it that it takes forever to dry. I just keep telling myself that this is an excellent learning opportunity and I'm counting down the days until my washer is fixed. 

• We finished our chicken moat expansion. 

The fencing now encompasses the new duck house area and connects all the poultry
together in a circuit around the garden

I'm glad to be done with construction for a while. We're taking a brief breather and catching up on backed up garden chores. In a couple of weeks we'll have to address our turkey housing issues. 

• My Ancona duck eggs are due to hatch today. When I woke up this morning, two of my eggs had pips (little holes in the shell). Thirteen of the 15 eggs made it to the end of the incubation period. I hope that I get a wide variety of colors and patterning and that most of them are girls. That's not too much to ask for, right? I found homes for any extra birds that should hatch. I should admit that things are moving slow enough at this point that I hope I get any ducks to hatch. 

Come on and hatch, little ducklings!

Homemade Powdered Laundry Detergent

It's cheap, it's compact, and it's easy to store. You can buy a few boxes of the ingredients and have clean clothes for years.  It's even mostly "green". Here's how I made my own laundry detergent.

There are several different recipes for laundry detergent floating around out there, but here are the ingredients for the one I chose to use:

Borax, Washing Soda, Fels-Naptha Soap and Oxi-Clean (Billy Mays would be proud.)

The first ingredient is Fels-Naptha laundry soap. I hear that this can be tricky to find. Strangely enough, I was able to find this in our small town grocery store! Our grocery store doesn’t consistently carry boneless skinless chicken breasts, but by cracky it has Fels-Naptha! As an added bonus, Fels-Naptha can also be used as a remedy for poison ivy.  It will strip the poison ivy oils right off your skin.

The second ingredient, which can also be challenging to find, is Washing Soda. This is not quite the same as baking soda. I also was able to find it in my grocery store but I was prepared to order it online via Lehman's. Alternatively, you can make washing soda by cooking baking soda on the stove or in the oven. If you homeschool like we do, changing sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate counts as a chemistry lesson, an added bonus!

The third and fourth ingredients are common: Borax and Oxi-Clean. Obviously, Oxi-Clean isn't exactly old-fashioned, so you will not find it in every laundry detergent recipe. Some recipes stick to just the first three ingredients or add baking soda instead.

How to make it: Most recipes call for grating the soap and melting the whole lot of ingredients together to create a liquid detergent. You end up with a 5 gallon bucket of slimy goop. That’s A) too much work and B) yet another 5 gallon bucket for me to trip over, so I decided to go for powdered detergent. I grated the soap and made sure my pieces were tiny. Then I mixed it with the other ingredients. I made a triple batch, which I calculated to be enough for roughly 158 loads.

When I did the math, this homemade laundry detergent cost me roughly 7 cents per load. The Tide HE detergent I had been buying at Sam’s Club costs about 20 cents per load. If I had skipped the Oxi-Clean, the savings would have been even greater. But does this stuff work?

Yes, it does. I have a front-loading HE washer which means I need only a small amount of HE-friendly (ie. low-suds) detergent. This detergent fits the bill. I found that 2 tablespoons of the detergent does a great job getting my clothes clean. The freshly washed clothes smelled faintly of the Fels-Naptha (a pleasant scent), but the scent faded quickly. I don’t like my laundry to have a strong smell, so that is a plus for me. All in all, I’d say this is a successful experiment.


Homemade Laundry Detergent Powder

1 bar Fels-Naptha laundry soap, shredded and pulverized
1 c. washing soda
1 c. Borax
1/2 c. Oxi-Clean

Mix together thoroughly. Add 1-2 T. per load for an HE washer, more as necessary for a conventional washer.

If you try it, let me know how it works for you!

Take the SurvivalMom's Report Card Challenge

One of the blogs I read reguarly is The SurvivalMom. A few days ago, she wrote this post, a report card on her current state of preparedness. It inspired me to rate our ability to survive during a crisis here at the Harried Homemaker Acres.

1) Water - C. I have 2 weeks of water stored for my family, four weeks if we use what is in our reverse-osmosis system, water heaters and random bottles stored here and there.

To turn this into an A: I need to buy a water filter and materials like bleach to sanitize additional water we would collect during a long-term emergency.



2) Sanitation - B. I've got about two months of toilet paper, a big bottle of hand sanitizer and a gallon of soap stored. I also have a large box of trash bags and a few 5-gallon buckets we could fashion into toilets if need be. 

To turn this into an A: More toilet paper! My goal is to have a year's worth on hand plus a large supply of paper towels. I would also like to have several more boxes of trash bags and perhaps a toilet seat we could affix to the aforementioned 5-gallon buckets. We used to have a burn barrel before we bribed convinced a mom and pop trash collection operation from a town 40 miles away to come and get our trash each week. We may need to get another barrel to use WSHTF or borrow our neighbor's barrel. (I live in a place without trash collection. I told you we live in the sticks!)



3) Laundry - D-. I have a bit of extra homemade laundry detergent and a large laundry room with a deep sink and racks that I could hang our clothes to dry in.

To turn this into an A: More laundry detergent, at least 6 months worth. I am also considering getting one of these or something similar that would make washing laundry by hand easier.


 

I wish this was my food storage! From UtahPreppers.com

4) Food Storage - D. If we ate some strange meals (peanut butter and green beans on pasta, anyone?), we could survive for at least a month, probably more. We would certainly be unhappy and probably constipated, though.

To turn this into an A: I need to keep storing a wide variety of foods. This needs to include all the food groups, plus some comfort foods to keep morale up. My goal is to have a minimum of 1 year of food stored. I'm working at it in 3 month increments (ie. get 3 months worth of all kinds of food before I store more of any one particular group). I need to have a selection of foods that are easy prep for those very busy days or if Hubby Dear has to make something on his own.


 
5) Knowledge and Skills - C. I'm continuing to read and research, buy items, and then test them out. In the past few months I've learned how to use a pressure canner and got some hands-on experience with wheat kernels. Our whole family is working toward becoming self-reliant through gardening. I've even bribed Hubby Dear to read Rawles' How to Survive TEOTWAWKI. Don't ask how I managed to accomplish that feat.

To turn this into an A: I need to continue what I'm doing but branch out into other areas far from my comfort zone. A major area we are lacking in is self-defense. We have always been against having firearms in our house but I'm beginning to see that this is an important part of preparedness. I need to get a ton of education and practice in this area before I make such a major commitment.


Compared to where we need to be, we score four raspberries on a five raspberry scale. Compared to where we were six months ago, however, we're definitely on the right track.

How do you rate?