Living a life more like the 1930s creates challenges, it also helps us to understand of where we are today verses 95 years ago. Something switched in my mind the day that Charles and I oiled our treadle machine with this small can of oil. It suddenly made this study more clear to me and what we are learning from it all.I went into the dining room and spread out some of my old vintage budget books and I started looking to see if I could figure out how much the categories have changed throughout the years. I wondered is it possible to get ourselves to where we have a 1930s budget? What would we need to give up? I thought about how happy I was in the 1 ......

Charles and I have been very busy the past several weeks. Our internet has been in and out, each time we called to report the outage we would go through all the typical phone instructions and then we would get a recording telling us that there was an outage in our area and they knew about it and reporting it any further would not help. Sometimes they would suggest a time that it would be back up.I free type my posts and click and save my work all along the way but if I had a few paragraphs written between save and the internet drops out I would lose what I had written and my train of thought. This is how I like to do my posts and I always say a prayer before I post and I ask God ......

Charles and I have been organizing and shifting things around again. It only takes one item coming in to the house to completely shift all rooms. Our rule is that something has to go out if something comes in. Sometimes we have to squish a bit, at least for awhile.Charles newly organized desk with his collection of presidential books. He loves history and woodworking. We are still clearing out Madge's house and cleaning. Last week we retrieved a desk that was once Charles desk when he was in College. This desk was in Madge's house and so we brought it home, and washed it inside and out with Grandma's Lye Soap and then rinsed it well and ......

I like to experiment with the budgets, trying out different ways that people used long ago. This above is a 1932 budget that I did show in a blog post several years ago. This was a young couple with a baby. They lived in Arizona in a big city. We all should keep track of our expenses and budget. We must know how much our expenses are and how much we spend. We always want to spend less than we bring in each month. By going through this 1932 budget book I could see how this young couple kept track of spending and tried to save money. The head of this household had a steady job with the railroad. They did start getting into financial trouble whe ......

This new study of 1930s brings calm to our home and it inspires us to think about how much we have that we really did not need. Many of our history studies have brought calm in certain ways, and some have been quite challenging but this one mostly has challenged Charles and I to use less of most everything. The first part of the 1930s that we started in 2023 we had the challenges of learning who had electricity and running water and who did not. We understood that it depended on where they lived, city or rural, in a city or a small town. Now we understand a new fact, which is that even if they did have it, many could not afford it and lost their services. What about toda ......

We are in the sixth month of this year of 2025, and five weeks and one day into our living during the great depression study. I hope that many of you are starting to get your feel of where you are going with the study and some of you are reading along to see what happens, I want to know too. It takes awhile to understand what needs to be done and to figure out how to get our home to a point that we can feel a change to understand what the home would have felt like during the early 1930s. We peel away the use of modern things and detox our mind so we can form our own thoughts. It also requires us to change to a simple functional home and a budget bas ......

Little by little our house is feeling more like the era that we are studying. The quiet of the home is due to little running to make noise in the house. In my previous studies I have talked about how the cities may have been modern but the small communities and rural areas still did not have electricity. We recently found that another reason for not having electricity during the 1930s was that they could not afford to have electricity which they called the light bill. I have been torn about how I use electricity during the study. As I was growing up old enough to remember in the 1950s I had family members that still did not have electricity. S ......

I feel that this new study of the 1930s comes at a good time. It is a good distraction from the unsettled times that we are in now. We can learn from the past and pick the parts that make sense to us and apply that to now. Why not today be the day that we take control of our personal space and prepare our home for possible hard times if they come or not. I am using the study to bring happiness and interesting information into our home. For the second weekend, I did a pie tasting with my family. The first weekend I baked two different lemon pie recipes from long ago. a 1931 recipe verses a 1950 recipe.This second tasting we tasted two st ......

Since starting the new 1930s study a few weeks ago I have been going about things in a calm and slow pace because I need that right now in this confusing time we live of 2025. I wonder how people felt in the 1930s when their life was suddenly complicated when their banks closed and many people lost their jobs.When Charles and I do these living history studies I am always looking for ways to get a feel of how it was during these years of long ago. It is the home that I am most concentrated on. I use many methods for researching, the research room in the public library, books, newspapers, real handwritten diaries, Journals and old budgets as well as recipes. You will fi ......

We cannot live in the past, but we can resemble them. This is what I believe because it seems to make more sense.This past week I have been tinkering around through things trying to make this study stick. I am taking my time sorting out the items that were not in the 1930s and thinking about the things that might be actually better for us today. Such as my stick blender, this is what I use to make mayonnaise. I have one of the old crank ones but the mayonnaise is always thin and I am guessing that homemade mayonnaise was probably more like a salad dressing consistency. I feel that we (the we is all of us, Charles and I and those of you doing the study) nee ......

Elizabeth is at her look out window and she says that everything looks the same out there.Inside the house is looking more like the past.The handles on the spatula and the egg skillet were different in the 1930s, these would have been Bakelite, a synthetic plastic. In 1933 polyethylene was accidentally invented and the start of the plastic revolution begun.I cannot remove everything from our home that was not yet on the market so I put things away and doing my best to simulate the 1930s, mostly concentrating on 1932 at this time because this is where we left off in the last study. It is a good place to transplant ourselves to learn how to live a very simple life.I encou ......

I am making a quick post today just to discuss some questions and comments this past week about clotheslines. Several people commented that where they live, they are not allowed to dry their laundry outside on a clothesline.Others questioned why and sadly, the answer is this is true in different states or HOA's in our country of the United States.However, please know that people have been fighting back for quite awhile and now we have a Right to Dry law and different states have changed the laws so that you can dry your laundry on a clothesline. There has been progress made.Check your state laws to see about the Right to Dry Law in your state. My daughter lives i ......

This is the last day of Peek Week and I will go over a few things we learned this week.In the past many people were very routine. We see that in the vintage kitchen towels with cute embroidery of the days of the week and the schedule of the week.Monday was wash day. Of course it can be any day we need it to be but it helps when we have some kind of a routine, especially with so many things to do in a home. But why is Monday wash day? So I did some research.An article in 1924 said that it was because Monday is the most miserable day of the week and washing is the most miserable thing in the world. By combining these inflictions into one, the rest o ......

Today is Saturday baking day, and we crank up the fire and bake our breads, pies, crackers, doughnuts and a cake. Sarah from my 1932 diary was always baking each Saturday. She would bake bread and Kuche, (something like a breakfast bread). She baked items for the upcoming week. My Aunt Leona baked many loaves of sweet bread each Saturday. Sarah would make her bread sponge the night before and baked bread and sweet Bread, her Kuche which is most likely a sweet breakfast bread. Sarah also made doughnuts.We can make our crackers for the upcoming week.Saltines are easy to make. I do not have the time to post recipes today but you can easily find recipe ......

It is peek week Friday and this means it is cleaning day. There are many years of blog posts on my blog and there are topics never read because they are far back in the post. Sometimes I will touch back on certain topics, sometimes I need reminders to help me get back on track. Today I am writing a new post on a old subject.In the past many women kept to schedules during the week. It was known that Monday was wash day and women would be hanging out their laundry to dry on Monday. It was a day to talk to one another across the fences and if someone did not have out their wash that day, others would take notice and someone would go to see if something ......

This is my brother born soon after ww2 ended in the 1940s. I was born only 14 months later and so my father must have been very happy to be back home.This was our first house that we lived in, we were too young to remember this house shown above.There I am at the first part of the 1950s standing by my brother. My father had this picture colorized. I lived in the city and my father worked in the furniture store. My brother was perfectly made for city life. Me.... not so much.I preferred the country, and that was obvious to me that when I was born, they messed up and I went home with the wrong family. Not really but I felt this way.When I was a child I did not know ......

I cherish the memories of when I was a child. So much was different then and in a very good way. Many of my family members such as my Grandmother, my Aunts and Uncles homes, would have flowers growing all over their yards. Much about their homes were different and each one was different. One reason is that many things were homemade. This photo above is one of my gladiolas, it grew against a small tree that is behind it in the photo. This gladiolas shown was last year for they have not yet bloomed this year and I am very excited because early this year I added many new gladiolas bulbs to our yard.I am looking forward to the new colors and these flowers remind me of home ......

I have decided to make this Peek Week as I have done off and on here on my blog a few times through the years. I do a post each day for week to get caught up on things.Since this is Tuesday (when making this post) here in the U.S., I will start off with Monday and Tuesday today. I have been away for awhile because frankly, I have lost my motivation to post anything with the constant upsets in our country. Charles and I have had to stay to ourselves to sort through our feelings of what is going on. I have been pouring myself into gardening, Charles has been helping me with all the changes to make gardening easier due to our age. This seems to be an ......

It is time to change the formula. This world has become very difficult and it is easy to lose our perspective with so much turmoil. I have to find a way to navigate through this time safely and keep our little space that we live protected. In the past I would go home to my older family members to get filled up with love and wisdom and my get my perspective back on track. Now that I am older, all of those elders are gone and I can no longer ask them for advice. Fortunately there is one thing that I can do and that is to pull from my life experiences to help navigate my way through as my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles did. Those experiences sho ......

We are living in a very different time, that is for certain. Whenever I get overwhelmed, I think about my grandmother and all of the challenging times that she lived through, and yet she managed to raise her children and keep on pushing through. She was born at the beginning of the year 1900, she went through serious wars, recessions, a great depression, and throughout those years they had not yet connected to electricity or running water. Because of my knowledge of her life and the history we have studied, I realize that we are looking at many possibilities that could throw us into deep trouble and challenge us because most of us are dependent ......