My father has been using a bread machine to make his own bread for years. It takes him a few minutes to mix the ingredients and put it in the machine, and not that long to wash up after ... and he produces about one loaf of bread each week. He has created his own variation on a standard recipe, and will use extra bits and pieces for some variety (like throwing in a little flax seed, or ground up sunflower seeds, or I think he used the last bit of a whole grain porridge in there once, etc.). I believe his recipe also takes slightly sour milk ... so when the milk is starting to going bad, rather than dumping it, he uses it in the bread.