You Might Be A Redneck...........

We live in a house that we bought almost 8 years ago when we were getting ready to get married. At the time, the house was 7 years old, which means that it is getting close to the 15 year mark. We have been lucky thus far in the "maintenance" area of our home until about 6 months ago. Some of the appliances have really been "showing their age" lately, which is to be expected, I guess. The first to go was the kitchen faucet. In the middle of pulling Brock out from underneath the sink one day, I noticed that some of the Wal Mart sacks that we keep under there were soaked with water. That led to noticing that there was a BAD leak that had been going on for who knows how long. I know that it had NOTHING to do with my tightwad self beating the living daylights out of the faucet on a daily basis, due to no water coming out of it. I would literally get the hammer after that thing because that is the only way that I was successful in getting water to come back out of it. Yes, I know, we should have just gotten a new one as soon as we started noticing the problem, but that just ain't the way I roll. I have to wait until something is COMPLETELY ruined before I will buy anything new!! Like I said....I am a tightwad! (We think there was a calcium buildup (or something like that) that was stopping the water from coming through without a good beating, which eventually led to the leak). We finally got a new faucet. After that came two broken toilet seats, a broken dryer, a broken garbage disposal, and now our dishwasher is affectionately known as "The Dish Wetter", due to the lack of actual CLEANING in does. It pretty much just gets the dishes wet with really hot water. We have pretty much resorted to hand washing our dishes, since our "dish wetter" appears to be on its last leg. The kids wanted to play outside yesterday morning, but I had lots of stuff to do since I was planning on leaving town for the weekend. One of those things involved washing dishes. So....me being the improviser that I am , just decided to load the dishes up and take them outside. That way I could kill two birds with one stone! So here are some pictures of my creative dish washing experience: Step 1. Take all dishes outside in a laundry basket (yes, one that is meant to hold clothing).

Step 2. Be prepared with some very hot, soapy water and a scrub brush.

Step 3. After washing each dish, throw them in yet another laundry basket, which will be referred to as the "dish drainer" from this point on.

Step 4. How did we rinse them? With the water hose, of course!

Step 5. Arrange them in the "dish drainer" and leave them out in the hot, summer sun to dry quickly!

Rylee actually asked me, "Mommy, is this how they washed dishes back in the old days?"

My response was, "Yes, baby.....only I am not sure that they used a laundry basket as the dish drainer.