How to wash clothes in bathtub Reddit

This sounds weird as shit, but use a (clean) toilet plunger or something to agitate it with. I worked in a factory, always came home COVERED in oil and filth.. hand washed my clothes cause my washer broke. Plunged the ever loving hell out of them, rinsed, plunged, rinsed, dried. Always turned out well and I still to this day, working washer and no longer in factory, still have a specific laundry plunger.

Hey New Yorkers. Look, I hear you-- some of you are suddenly and unexpectedly without access to a washer and dryer, and you’ve never done laundry in your bathtub before. Don’t worry about it, you can get by without a laundromat just fine.

You just gotta do it before you’re completely out of clothes. So, now.

I’m not giving you a video because this isn't nearly hard enough to need visual aids. It’s not hard, you just gotta do it. You fucking got this.*

Now, while you could kill yourself trying to pretend you’re a commercial washing machine and shake the everloving fuck out your clothes for 45 minutes, I'd suggest that you chill the fuck out. The secret here is WATER + SOAP + TIME:

1. CHOOSE: Pick the clothes you want to wash and put them in your bathtub. Only choose as much stuff as you have the capacity to dry! THIS IS IMPORTANT-- you're not helping yourself by converting your bag of dry dirty clothes into a bag of wet mildewy clothes. My apartment has some towel hangers and a shower curtain rod, so I can dry about 20 things at a time, therefore I wash about 20 things at a time.

2. PREWASH: Turn on the water. Hot/cold, I don’t care, just put enough of it in there to soak your clothes. Mash it all down in there so it’s all wet, turn off the water and come back later. Like 10 minutes is fine but whatever, your clothes will wait for you.

3. WASH: If your water looks dirty from prewash, drain it and refill it. Add your soap, kneel down and grab chunks of your clothes and push them around in the water. If there are stains or other bits of crap to deal with, focus on that now. Don't stomp around on your clothes like how you think wine is made, the last thing we need right now is you going to the ER because you slipped in the soapy water.

4. LEAVE: Yeah just leave your clothes alone in the soapy water. Come back later.

5. WASH A LITTLE MORE AND DRAIN: Push it all around a little more because it’s been sitting in the soapy water, then drain the water.

6. RINSE: Add fresh cold water. Push your clothes around in the fresh cold water to get the soap and the last of the dirt out. Drain and repeat at least once, but stop whenever you’re tired of dealing with this. If you’d rather, you can blast your stuff with your showerhead.

7. DRY: Hang up your stuff to dry. As you pick each thing out of your tub, squeeze the water out of it with your hands as best you can. If you’ve got a fan or a window or something to help with air flow, use that.**

8. PUT IT AWAY: So that other people can use the damn bathroom again. Let it dry overnight or whatever but put it away before you want to take another shower or else you’ll just piss yourself off.

Fucking good job. You did your laundry. You also just saved yourself like $10-20 too. I normally wash all my shit every two weeks or so at a laundromat, but now I do a small load every other day in the bathtub after everybody in my house has had their morning showers. And don’t think I’m some life-hacker trying to laundry-shame you; I have kids and the laundry never fuckin' stops.

*The bar is really low here. Dispel any notion that washing machines are magical germ-killing machines. They’re not, they just shake your clothes around with some soapy water for a while. You can do that.

** Some people like to put their wet clothes in a dry towel then stomp around on it to squeeze the water out. If you need to dry things faster, this works. I personally don't do this because it's more work and I'd have to dry the towel too.

[edit] TL;DR: You have everything you need to wash your clothes. You got this.
[edit 2] My first gold! Thank you :-)

How do you quickly wash clothes in the bathtub?