During our college student, grad. student, gradually starving while teaching college years, I did a lot of tub laundry, too. I never found a satisfactory way to wash and dry towels without using the machines; I just couldn’t stomp all the soap out of them during the rinse and sundrying left them notably abrasive. We finally had machines of our own when our first child was born, but I was so used to air drying that we didn’t use the dryer much – except for towels and diapers. An air-dried diaper turns out like a shingle.
Since we didn’t have much space in most of our earlier apartments and tiny houses, I tried to keep the inventory of cleaning products to a minimum. One of the manstays was a big jug of Dr. Bronner’s castille soap which, despite the odd religious ravings all over the bottle, is just invaluable. My husband liked the peppermint scented kind best. I diluted it in a smaller bottle for bathing, used a stronger solution for washing dishes and scrubbing plumbing fixtures, a light solution for washing linoleum, and dumped some of the concentrated form into the sink or tub for laundry. I used warm, but not hot, water for all but the delicate laundry, and didn’t need gloves to protect my hands because it was the same soap I bathed with. (I tried using Dr. Bronner’s as shampoo. Okay in a pinch, but not what I would call a good idea, longterm.) We were in a dry climate for a lot of this time and generally had some kind of outdoor porch or something, but the wind was unpredictable and strong, so I only hung stuff outside when I was home to keep an eye on it. When I knew I would be in class or shopping or at work or at home but reading and not needing to move around the apartment much for a few hours, I would turn two kitchen chairs back to back, about a broom’s length apart, lay the broom and the mop parallel across from one chair back to the other. I could put damp clothes on hangers and hang them, spaced a few inches apart, on the mop handle, dry a couple of sweaters flat on the chair seats, drape things over the other backs of the chairs and over the broom handle. In the winter, I set this up in the little hallway in front of the wall-unit heater. During the rest of the year, I opened all of the windows and set it up where the air circulation was the best. I didn’t bleach whites often, but when I did, I wore rubber gloves and used hotter, but still not painful, water. When I washed whites, that was the only laundry I did that day. As long as I had the Clorox out, I did the extra-thorough cleaning – bleaching the tub, the toilet, and the bathroom and kitchen sinks.
Now, with three kids and needing to maintain a professional wardrobe for my husband – who fled academia for the more lucrative and humane world of finance several years ago --and needing, myself, to at least occasionally portray the perky suburban wife/mother, I am glad to have all modern laundry coneniences available to me in-house. I don’t do much tub laundry anymore, though my bathtubs would probably be cleaner if I did. I still look forward to springtime when my dryer can go on curtailed duty, since I dislike the feel of machine-dried sheets, especially. Even during the winter, when it is so cold and dry that the snow sublimates before it gets the chance to melt, I like to wash quilts and sheets and hang them out on railings and fences to air-dry/freeze-dry. Still, though, towels always go in the dryer and diapers would too if we weren’t, mercifully, beyond that stage in our life. Washing two people’s clothes by hand is kind of a romantic “hardship”, but by the time you’re up to five people in a household, technology is much appreciated. BTW, I have used Dr. Bronner’s in washing machines and it works just fine. I have used it, especially, for baby clothes, since detergent residue can be irritating to young skin.