How an Old Home Made Me Rethink Sustainable Living
After the turmoil of the past year or so, many of us are trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
But, once you start looking into sustainability, it gets a little disheartening. If you look at influencers in the sustainable lifestyle category, it seems like you need to spend a lot of money and time to make changes in your lifestyle.
Around this time last year, I accidentally embarked on an eco-friendly lifestyle switch, and I’ve been surprised by the results.
Old House Problems
My husband and I love the charms that old houses have. We knew that they generally involve maintenance, but we didn’t take into account that the lives people led nearly 100 years ago are very different from the ones we lead now.
Our home has only been lightly updated in the past 100 years (which is how we were able to afford to buy it in Nashville’s current housing market). We knew going in that the house didn’t have the hookups for a washer and dryer, but we assumed that we would be able to make space for them somewhere.
For a couple of months, we had the washer and dryer on the back deck. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a long-term solution because the deck was structurally unsound and needed to be removed.
After many reconfigurations, we realized that we would only be able to fit the washer inside our home. The only other option was to buy a new washer and dryer in a different size.
Given that we were spending a large amount on renovations already, I decided that we could hang our clothes up to dry rather than buying new units immediately. This was supposed to be temporary. We even picked out the models that we wanted, and we have had multiple opportunities to buy them.
What Is Really a Necessity?
It turns out that air-drying clothes instead of using a dryer isn’t that inconvenient. I even already owned a collapsible rack that I bought years ago to air dry some of my more delicate clothes.
The clothes almost always dry in less than half a day. They would dry even faster if I put them outside during the summer, but I am opting for convenience rather than speed.
I’m sure that we’re saving a little bit of money by not using the electricity that dryers use. According to the calculator from the Department of Energy, our household of two adults would spend around $70 on electricity for our normal dryer use.
So, it’s not a dramatic amount of savings. Still, we are using less energy and our clothes last longer.
The real eye-opening part for me has been how little this switch has affected our lives. I thought that I was going to be making a small sacrifice to help speed up more necessary renovations, but air-drying clothes hasn’t been difficult. I’ve only had an issue with clothes not being dry when I needed them once in the past year.
All this time, I had considered a dryer a necessity that I couldn’t live without. Even though I had spent time living in an apartment in France without one, I never imagined that a house I owned wouldn’t have a dryer. My dream home Pinterest board has multiple laundry room ideas.
The possibility of living without a dryer had never seriously entered my mind before, so I’m amazed that a dryer isn’t a priority for us right now.
Changing Views on a Sustainable Lifestyle
Even though I have always considered a dryer a necessity, our old home makes it clear that both washers and dryers are a more recent addition to modern life. There’s no good place for us to keep these appliances in our home because household washers and dryers weren’t a thing in the late 1920s.
When I told my grandmother that we didn’t currently have a dryer, she mentioned that she didn’t have one until they moved to a new neighborhood when my mother was in high school. The idea that every household needs a dryer to function properly is a new one.
I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to live without a dryer or even that we won’t have a dryer at some point in the future. Instead, this accidental experiment has opened my mind to consider what other items I view as necessities that aren’t as important as I had thought.
Creating a more sustainable lifestyle wasn’t my goal when we decided to sell our dryer, but it’s shown me that maybe some of the eco-friendly changes that seem drastic aren’t really as dramatic as I imagine.
Most of us aren’t currently in situations where we can make our lifestyle completely sustainable. Maybe we can’t take public transportation to work or exclusively buy our groceries in bulk with no packaging. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways of our rethinking our current levels of consumption