Now that I’ve been keeping a closer watch on our expenses, I’m amazed at how much money we’ve spent getting sucked into “conveniences.” Before we moved we had a cleaning lady, which was a wonderful convenience (in that I could count on my home being spotless every Monday). But thanks to the home organization site FlyLady, I’ve re-learned how to keep house–and now I can do it for free. Bye-bye, cleaning lady and $300 a month in expenses.
The same can be said for the “convenience” of home shopping for foods. We used to buy our meat directly from a local company that would drive its freezer-laden truck to our home once a month, and we would buy right out of the back. Sure, we’d get months worth of salmon, tilapia and chicken in convenient, single serving packages, but you had to buy in bulk and it was not cheap. Most shopping stops would set us back $400. Worse, when we moved a few weeks ago and had to unplug our extra freezer, in which I’d stored all of this bulk fish and chicken, I found pounds and pounds of frozen fish that I had had great intentions of cooking but never got around to doing so. Now, these once-gorgeous fillets were white and freezer burned. I’m afraid to add up how much I ended up throwing away in unused fish.
One of the last conveniences that I think is about to go on the chopping block is the delivery dry cleaning services. About two years ago we started using a local company that picks up and delivers our dry cleaing every Monday and Thursday, because my recently promoted husband couldn’t get away with polo shirts at work anymore. He was now expected to wear a shirt and tie on most days, and since we couldn’t remember the last time we’d used an iron–or even where it was–it was time to start sending out Bill’s shirts. Mind you, using this service is not tremendously expensive: we spend about $1.25 per shirt and send out, maybe, 10 shirts a week. However, in the course of this move, a couple of things happened.
1) We found the iron
2) We forgot to notify the dry cleaning service of our new address and two weeks went by without any shirts going out.
3) Because two weeks went by without sending Bill’s shirts out, I had to wash them.
And an amazing thing happened: we discovered that if you wash dress shirts, and throw them in the dryer for 10 minutes, you can take them out when they’re slightly damp and hang them up to dry. Once dry, they look almost perfect. I especially love using this technique on Bill’s no-iron shirts from Jos. A. Bank, because they really do come out of the dryer–and then dry on the hanger–looking as if they’ve been pressed.
Today, the dry cleaning service finally figured out our new address. I didn’t have any shirts to give to them, and I should probably give them a call and ask them to take us off of their route. I know it’s not earth-shattering to figure out how to launder a man’s shirt but having been sucked into the convenience of the dry cleaner doing this dirty job for so long, I’m amazed that I can do it just as well and at a considerable savings.
READ LEAH ON HOME GOES STRONG
Leah,
My husband, the laundry king, taught me the dress-shirt-in-the-dryer strategy! He has to wear dress shirts most days. The dryer saves a lot of time. I hate ironing. My mother gave up trying to teach me because I hated it so bad!
Just wondered if you hang your clothes on the line to dry? I think we’re the only ones in the neighborhood who does that. In Utah where I live, it’s so dry we can hang clothes out all winter if it’s sunny.
Marilyn:
In our old neighborhood, we werent’ allowed to have a clothesline so I got in the habit of hanging up shirts in the laundry room right on hangers. (Besides, I never liked the sort of indentation that clothes pins would leave on the edges of clothes.) In our new house, there is actually a bar running across one wall of the laundry room, which allows me to hang these shirts up on a hanger, hang them on the bar to dry, and then put them right into the closet when they are dry.