An Epiphany

I've been having Water Issues all winter and now they're as good as I can expect them to be--I have running water to the bathroom and bedroom/laundry room, but not the kitchen... and my drain is frozen solid.

This is not conducive to maintaining a healthy dish washing routine. I've been doing the 'rinse everything, wash what you need in a bucket' method for months now and dishes are piling up. Let me repeat that things are rinsed, so there's no funky mould going.

Sitting here an hour ago, procrastinating on making breakfast or doing something 'useful' with my morning, I started to surf at Frugal Living and came across a page that made me go DOH!

I have a thing in my bedroom called a 'washing machine.' It's working fine in that water comes in and I can put the hose out the window so the contents don't drain all over my bedroom floor. It's also, as the author of the article said, a huge bucket that fills and empties itself....

Five minutes later, I had the machine half-filled with hot soapy water, dishes soaking in it, and a drying area set up on the dryer. Once a dish is washed, you can turn the water back on to rinse, then off again, just like with a sink!

The bucket method works well for only small amounts of dishes since you need to dry-as-you go lest soap dry all over your dishes and also continually replenish the hot water. With the machine machine method, you can air dry since you've rinsed. I did in fifteen minutes an amount of dishes that would have taken me at least two hours using the bucket method and at least forty-five minutes using the kitchen sink (if it was working).

Just make sure you don't have any food stuck to your machine and then rinse it out after!