Yes, for one because I haaaaaate using cash, and that's the only way to get quarters for the machines (they only accept quarters) the machines leak, don't wash the clothes completely, and I've been wanting to do my laundry more "green" for awhile now. I also like the idea of always being able to do laundry, no matter where I find myself.

Handwashing update for anyone who's interested (probably no one, ha ha): rapid-washer plunger hasn't arrived yet, but the washboard has.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...-38-19_447.jpg
Washing equipment: Rubber tub, washboard, 20 Mule Team, and Fels-Naptha soap. The soap smells sooooooo good, much better than the super-perfumed stuff for machines. (Even the "fragrance free" stuff smells weird to me.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...-02-39_428.jpg
1/2 cup of Borax, rub Fels-Naptha over the washboard surface then go to town. It's quite an ab workout! I was astonished at how quickly grime started coming up out of the clothes, especially my socks. I even washed a pair of socks that was "clean" from the machine and the soles immediately started looking nicer, and the suds that came out were all dingy. Ewww. So just looking at things, especially my white underclothes, the washboard definitely got them looking cleaner than the washing machine.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...-44-28_341.jpg
And drying. As Roody said, wringing and rinsing items was the most time consuming part of the process. I was able to wash everything in 35-45 minutes, I could probably cut that way down if I had a wringer. Clothes are drying on the rack right now, I'll have to see how they look and feel when they're dry. If this works, I'll only have to use the washing machines for bed linens and my bathroom rugs and things. Because I don't have many clothes (4 days worth at most) being able to only use the washing center once every 1 or 2 weeks will be awesome.

That's amazing that it doesn't really take any longer than if you used the machine. Maybe less time than if you have to travel to the laundromat.

Laundromats were always tricky when carfree. My last house was just a couple hundred yards from a laundromat, so I would walk over with a weeks worth of laundry in a big seabag. I will admit that every couple months my son would drive to the laundromat and wash bulky items for me. I could have done it, but he likes to spoil me.

Kookaburra and the rest of you can probably understand me when I say this: one of the cool things about this simple living is figuring out "new" ways of doing things and proving to ourselves that we can be inventive and creative.

I think the reason it will work for me is that I really don't have many clothes in my every-day wardrobe, and most of those are scrubs (which will get boiled before being washed) - if I had a week or two's worth of clothes, or at least enough to fill a washing machine it might not have been worth it. Of course, it takes more of *my* time - since with the laundry center across the parking lot all I had to do was put clothes in, set a timer, and do something else for an hour. But this wasn't too onerous, I did it during my evening news time. We'll see if I still feel the same way in a few months, lol.

Clothes are still damp this morning, I'm going to go get a box fan, maybe a heated one today to help speed up drying times.

I wear scrubs also. The polyester ones are easy to clean, dry quickly, and look halfway decent after line drying. Have you tried ironing your damp clothes to finish drying them and make them look nicer? My mother did that when I was a kid. She just let them partially dry, then ironed them. In the summer, she would put them in a the refrigerator (in a plastic bag) to keep them from getting funky (fungus-y) until she had time to iron.

Haven't tried ironing, as I don't have one, but that would be a good way to avoid having to boil the scrubs to get the nasties out - give them a nice shot of steam. Yeah, they do dry quickly! Once when my hospital was going through renovations hallway closures meant I had to walk alllll the way around the outside of the building during an Oregon coast rainstorm to get back to the ER. I looked like someone had thrown me in the ocean, I was so wet. But they were totally dry in 45 minutes. The rest of my clothes are t-shirts and jeans, so making them look nicer is kind of a futile exercise.

I use a fan to dry my clothes faster. That is much less energy than a dryer. The humidity is usually a bit low in my area of the world so that helps. When I lived in Los Angeles one summer I recall hanging a wet towel to dry. It was completely dry in two hours.

Kookaburra1701 do you wear rubber gloves when washing your clothes? How many times must you scrub things up and down on that washing board to get them clean? These laundry tools do seem ideal for adding to an RV travel kit.

I don't wear gloves - I probably should, especially with the Borax. It doesn't really hurt my hands, but I do a lot of work with my hands, so they're nice and calloused. For most clothes I only have to scrub a section of clothing 5-8 times, when I had the grease on my jeans it took maybe 10-15 times. (I was also using Dawn dishsoap on the grease.) I don't see any trace of the black marks, and I know I would have had to run them several times through the hot wash in the machine to get those marks out.

The breathing rapid washer (the plunger) is really neat, it arrived today. It really does sound like it is breathing - my cat came out to investigate and puffed up and hissed at it, ha ha. I mostly used it for rinsing - my first test, I used the Fels-Naptha and the washboard on some sweaty tshirts, and then rinsed and wrung them out in the sink. Then I filled the sink basin with clear water and used the rapid washer, and it got TONS more soap out that I wasn't able to do just by hand. It collapses nice, the handle is threaded and unscrews, and is pretty short. If I was going to use it in the tub on the floor, I'd try to replace the handle with a longer one like one Amazon reviewer did. But it would work great in small spaces.

ETA: I think this is one of those times where what counts as "simple" gets twisted up - it would definitely be simpler to trot across the parking lot and use the machines there. But it would be really expensive pretty quick, and what can I say, I'm a tree-hugger at heart. :)

Sears should still sell stacked washer-dryer units, which could be used with a cutoff valve to hook into the bathroom and drain into the tub/shower. Your landlord might not approve though. I'll never move into another apartment for as long as I live, even if I get stacked in a cemetary with vertical plots or whatever (like inurned people do, my dad is at the veteran's cemetary).

LOL the bathroom is too small. All of the pictures I got when I googled "small bathroom organization" showed larger bathrooms than mine. You have to have to step into the tub to shut the door, as the arc of the door sweeps the only place to stand.

Is anybody still getting rid of their possessions? In the last three weeks I've sold a dresser, two bed side tables, a coffee table, some toys, a jewelry box, and an old sewing machine cabinet with a sewing machine. I'm almost ready to give away the last few furniture bits. That leaves me with about one-hundred more boxes of stuff (18" x 18" X 16"). The furniture is going easily as long as the prices are really low.

My feeling is that once the furniture is gone most of the clutter will be gone. Boxes don't take up a lot of space. They're more compact. I think I'll just go through them one at a time and decide what to do with the contents. Eventually I'll be down to only the things I want.

I literally could fill my small bedroom nearly to the ceiling with the boxes I have. I wonder just how much of that stuff will be wanted by anybody. My encyclopaedias and other books that came with them won't be wanted. They're from the late sixties. Too bad. These days library sales are full of them. I'm going to try Craigslist for a while to see if free things will be picked up. I have trouble enough trying to get people to come and buy valuable things using that site. It's times like these that I wish I lived in a big metropolitan area. Craigslist would actually work for me there.

Moved into a smaller flat, which required getting rid of quite a few things, especially books. Having a Kindle has allowed me to give away or recycle hundreds of volumes that were cluttering up my life. I'm now down to just a few dozen. My wife--alas--is unable to get rid of things so easily. She's kept a set of encyclopedias that haven't been consulted in years. When I suggested recycling them, she said she'd acquired them when she was a teenager and they bring back fond memories.

An ambitious project would be for her to scan them. She could then have all of the same pages available for her memories but on a computer disc. I would love to have a fast scanner that could handle two pages at once and put them into a file. I could rip up all of my favorite paperback books for scanning and have them on my computer. I don't have many of them so the project could be completed in a day or two.

The new Kindle Paperwhite looks good but I think I would go with a Nexus 7. It is my hope that the next version of it will come with a card reader. When that happens it will be a great e-reader. There are some wireless external hard drives that would work with the Nexus 7 now but I want the convenience of an SD card.

Do you have freecycle in your town? It's a good way to get rid of things you don't want that have value to others. Google freecycle and the name of your town to fincd out. Also, Goodwill and Salvation Army in some locations will come and pick up donations.

Question for e-reader people out there. I want to get a Kindle (I will only be using it for reading, so getting a tablet-pc-lite like the Kindle Fire or Nexus doesn't appeal) but can you read pdfs or Word documents on it?

pdfs yes, word docs have to be converted. I have a Kindle Touch and love it. I typically have about 4-5 books going at once depending on my mood. I am also using the new Nexus 7. I use it to check email, do light net surfing and read a few technical magazines that I subscribe too. I like the battery life and size of the kindle for general reading, but the Nexus isn't too shabby either.

Aaron :)

Yeah, I have a netbook I use to do email/word processing when out and about, the battery life is ok on it (~5 hours) but I like that the Kindle can go for like a month or two without needing to be charged. Do you have to get the pay-version of Acrobat to convert Word docs? I can never remember.

Just today I watched a video review of the Kindle Paperwhite compared to a Nook with similar specifications. The reviewer said that PDF files don't come out well on them. http://www.youtube.com/user/TheeBookReader

As far as Freecycle goes, it requires me to sign up to use it. There aren't many people using it in my area. It would have fewer people looking at it than Craigslist.

My biggest job will be selling all of my mothers collectible figurines and art. That will be a lot of ebay auctions, no less than fifty and perhaps as many as one-hundred when I get through all of the boxes.

You should consider an auction, or have a dealer come in and buy the whole lot. You won't get as much, but you have to consider how much of your time (and sanity) will be sacrificed to tracking 100 auctions and packing all those delicate figurines for shipping. I can barely imagine what a nightmare that would be!

I may actually have a friend who may want your encyclopedias. He is amassing a library of books. He may also be interested in any of the books you think no one will want, or I may even possibly be. You are welcome to send me a short list of some or if you are over ambitious you are welcome to send an exhaustive list.

Yes although not actively enough. I haven't started selling things too much. Bicycles will be tough, I might sell parts instead. :rolleyes:

I'm almost done scanning all my older pictures and ripping all my music CDs, I'll see where I go from here. I thought I had a lot of boxes but I managed to get everything into 18 boxes, 4 of those being bicycles. :innocent:

As weird as it may sound, I don't mind giving valuables away instead of going thru the selling process. I do have a few things that I received from my grand-parents and that my parents would hate to see me give away... I'll have to do it at some point though. :(

Some say "if you have money, spend it". That way of thinking is not for everyone and that's understandable. But people who also spend money like your friend may just want to live life to the fullest. Not everyone is thinking about 20 years down the road. They like to live in the now rather than the future, and instead of planning exactly how your years ahead will go, just let the wind take them where ever.

I know some who live this way, but they also tend to have more money problems, now and in the future. Planning ahead and living modestly is much easier.

Also, the attitude of "if you have money, spend it," often becomes "if you don't have money, spend it anyway." And that leads to far more financial stress than living more modestly.

cute.pdf is the way to convert Word and whatever other files you want to pdf. Free download, sets up as a printer. No mucking around with Acrobat on-line.