Here’s my question:
Do you think you could live 1900’s style? What do you think is the limit of what you could do without? Could you work around it?
When I switched my house around, I no longer had a microwave. (It is mounted in my upstairs kitchen). I can’t believe the number of people who come over and are in awe of the fact that I have’t missed it enough to buy another one. Frankly, I’m amazed myself!
If I were able to live on my property (I have about 13 acres of land) I am confident that I could:
use an outhouse
deal with menstrual issues
kill and cook food
stay warm
wash clothes
keep reasonably clean (or lower my standards)
stay entertained (my husband and I love games- cards, dice, playing music, charades, etc)
sleep
Where would you draw the line? I say I can do these things because my husband and I have done some “real” camping (not a campground). Genuine roughing doesn’t bother me much, so I think I could adapt. The one thing I would miss is my car, but I guess I’d just buy a horse.
I COULD do it for three months, yeah. But would I enjoy it? The clothes and the books; and that’s about it. Even if I had a squadron of maids, I could never get past the food, the squalor, the bugs (very few houses had window screens then).
That’s why I like WRITING about the past–I get to dive in, but stay dry.
My family has a relatively primative cabin where I spent a good part of my childhood. It has a propane tank, so we had gaslights, a gas powered fridge, and a gas range. The heat came from a woodstove. No plumbing - we haul water from a creek out front of the cabin. There’s an outhouse out back. To bathe, there’s a wood heated sauna. You haul water up from the creek, and put it in the cistern next to the sauna stove & it heats up.
If I were to contrast that with the 1900’s house, the main difference I can think of would be the refridgerator. No fridges in the 1900’s. Also, I’ve never actually washed clothes up there. That would be a hassle, I’m sure. But all in all, if someone told me I had to live there for 3 months, I think I could. I’d have to buy food (the winters are just too long up there to expect one or two people to live without store bought food), but they did that in the 1900’s as well. Limiting myself to non-convenience food might be difficult.
I think the worst part would be living sans tampax. And, I would not even attempt to keep my house as clean as they seemed to do in the 1900’s. No way would I be spending time cleaning the “formal parlor.”