Literally, of course! Well, after it’s been washed. You won’t find any juicy details here. Living in a tiny floating home has certain challenges, such as doing laundry.
Once upon a time I lived in a 4,000 square foot house with a brand new front-load high efficiency washing machine and matching dryer. You know, those massive machines that are so silent you don’t even know they’re on. There were so many settings I had to read the manual to figure out how it all worked. Boy do I miss those machines.
It’s rare that you find space to put a washing machine on a boat, and it’s a luxury if you do. Luckily, our boat came with one already installed! Without this machine our only options to do laundry would be to transport it to shore via dinghy and walk to a laundromat, or hand-wash our clothes and linens in a bucket on the boat.
Even with the washing machine on board, we use a mixture of the three washing methods, depending on where we are. Sometimes we have easy access to an inexpensive laundromat, in which case it’s worth the time and money to use the commercial machines. Sometimes we need something small washed immediately so we will do a quick bucket-wash and hang the wet items over our lifelines with clothespins to dry. If it’s a sunny day (giving us maximum voltage from our solar panels) and if we have enough water in our tanks, we can run a load of laundry in the tiny washing machine.
Ours is a HAIER Fully Automatic washing machine, Model No. XQMB22-C. It runs off A/C power so the inverter or generator must be on to power the unit. It has multiple cycle options with vari agitate/rinse cycles, or spin only. It even plays “Jingle Bells” when the cycle is complete! I have NO idea how or why that was programmed in or if it can be changed. We always laugh when we hear it. The spin cycle discharges water through a hose that runs into the sink. To conserve water, we divert the discharge hose to a 5-gallon bucket on the last rinse and reuse that water on the first wash cycle of the next load.
Though it doesn’t wash much at one time, it’s just enough to fill up our lifelines with clothes hanging out to dry. There’s something about sun-kissed and line-dried laundry that you can’t beat.
How do you do laundry in your tiny house?
By Jody Pountain for the [Tiny House Blog]