How to Hand Wash Clothes at Home
If, due to the coronavirus outbreak, you are not particularly enthusiastic about going to the laundry room – or even using the shared laundry room in your building – I’m here to tell you that you can actually hand wash almost anything that needs to be washed at home; I’ve done this before, often for extended periods of time.
Even denim.
And towels too .
Yes, it does so much faster if you wash lightweight fabrics that dry quickly, and much faster if you wash for just one person, but I did it myself for five-gallon buckets, bathroom and tub sinks, and it is possible .
(I actually recommend a bucket or sink over the bathtub; this is one of those situations where you want as little splash space as possible.)
Here’s what you need and how the components work together:
A container filled with water
Get a bucket, a sink with a stopper, or a bathtub with a stopper. You are going to fill this container with water at the temperature at which you want to wash your clothes.
Some kind of soap or washing powder (but not detergent)
Your huge jug of heavy duty laundry detergent is likely to be too concentrated to use here; If you are not very careful and only drop a few drops, it will be very difficult to remove all of the soap from your clothes. To be honest, I enjoy using dish soap. Laundry powders are fine too, and washing delicacies with a moisturizing shampoo always makes them very soft.
Agitator
Once you add the soap to the running water and turn the container into a frothy mass, it’s time to add your clothes and start freaking out. (Remember, clothes take up space in the bucket, so don’t fill it up so much that it overflows.) While you can probably use a large wooden spoon or something, if you really want to, the best stirrer I’ve found is these are my own two hands. Just walk in there and start whipping, squeezing and squeezing until everything is really, really soapy. If you have food debris or other sand on any of your clothes, pay a little more attention to these particles until the surfactant does its job and they fly away.
Rinse with water
You need to somehow rinse the soap off your clothes, and I like to use any faucet closest to my water tank. For example, if I wash clothes in the bathroom sink, I let them drain and the soapy clothes remain in the sink. Then I take one piece of clothing at a time, rinse it under the tap in the sink until the water runs clear, turn off the tap, wring it out until it stops dripping, and hang it up to dry.
Drying rack
If you already have a dedicated dryer, great. Otherwise, you can hang clothes on a shower curtain bar, throw T-shirts over the backs of chairs, pull a homemade clothesline across the bedroom (I’ve done this before), or strategically position them where your freshly washed clothes will go. exposed to enough air to turn into freshly dried clothing.
Many of us have probably done this kind of wash before, whether we wash our swimwear or hand wash our bras. It’s the same concept on a larger scale – and yes, I understand it doesn’t scale very well, especially if you’re used to taking multiple loads of laundry to the laundry at the same time. But these days, we all try to stay at home as much as possible, and this is another important way to keep you at home and at a physical distance.
And remember, we no longer have to shake out dirty laundry, especially if we live with a family with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19. Just put these clothes directly in a bucket or tub and get to work, and when you’re done, wash your hands. Again.