How to Wash Chlothes Without a Washing Machine

While washing machines are a wonderful invention, if you don’t have one or yours is broken down and you still need to wash clothes, you can do so without a machine.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Hot water
• Fabric softener
• A clothesline or rod to hang clothes to dry
• A basin or two, or a bathtub or sink
• Laundry Soap

1. Sort the clothes into piles of like colors.

2. Fill a large wash basin, bathtub or sink with hot water.

3. Add some laundry soap to the basin, tub or sink.

4. Put in a few items of clothes.

5. Let them soak for a few minutes to get the dirt loose.

6. Using a scrub wash board, run the clothes up and down the wash board.

7. Put into a basin of fresh and clean warm water to rinse the soap out of the clothes. You can also add a little fabric softener to your rinse basin to have softer clothing.

8. Squeeze as much water from the items as possible then hang to drip dry.

Tips & Warnings

• For stains, use a stain pre-treater on wet clothing and let stand according to the directions on the bottle.
• This takes some serious elbow grease—you will have to run the clothes on the washboard a few times to make sure they are clean.
• It’s important to make sure that you rinse the soap out of the clothes. Failure to do so could result in stiff clothing as well as rashes and other skin irritations from the left-on soap.