When hubs and I first got married, we were very much enjoying our little Honeymoon Bubble, and we were being lazy as Hell. We didn't do many chores, but the laundry we really let go. We weren't wearing many clothes at home anyway, so why bother. Anyhow, after weeks we finally reached the swimming suit bottoms situation, and decided it was time. It was loads and loads of laundry that needed done, so I had my husband back the trunk of the car up to a window of the house, then he popped the trunk, and I started tossing laundry out of the window into the trunk. We went to the bank, got about $30 bucks in quarters, and found the emptiest laundry mat we could, and did it all in one fell swoop. We folded it all and loaded it back into the car using those wheeled laundry carts. We never let it get that bad again, and decided it was time to be adults, and do regular chores, but it still makes me laugh imagining what the neighbors and the laundry attendant thought.
Feel free to share your own laundry story, if you feel like it, I love hearing people's stories!
@RickiTarr When I was a super broke college student, I always used the laundry room in one of the dorm towers on campus. Someone stole my entire load of jeans out of a dryer. All the jeans I owned but one pair. 😣😫😩
I posted flyers in every laundry room on campus: GO AHEAD & WEAR THOSE JEANS YOU STOLE—I’LL BE WATCHING FOR YOU, & WHEN I FIND YOU, I’LL STOMP YOUR BONY ASS INTO PASTE.
@RickiTarr when I was in university, I did costumes for a 45 person production of a midsummer night's dream. I spent quite some time at the laundromat washing, drying, sorting and folding all the costumes.
Not only the sheer amount of stuff (I was using 10 washers simultaneously) but also the kind of garments I was handling attracted quite a few onlookers and commentators.
Also unforgotten the time my dog died and I went to wash her pillow and it ripped to shreds.
I completely broke down.
@RickiTarr
A long time back, I shared a house with a guy who worked for one of the big tobacco companies.
One of the perks of his job was taking home all the cigarettes he could smoke, so for all practical purposes he had no sense of smell.
Our washing machine was a top-loader, and he'd forget about having put a load through it - for days on end.
When I told him I'd lifted the lid and the stench of rotting clothes tripped my gag reflex, he accused me of over-reacting.
Conveniently, the drier was mounted above it, and I habitually used the undercover clothesline in the garage, so I worked around the issue by checking daily for his laundry and just shoving it in the drier. He dealt with it when he got to it.
@RickiTarr I lived with a friend for about 6 months when I moved to NYC. He was out at raves every night & always came home around 6am. Never did laundry. Every few weeks, it’d get real bad & he’d put it in a black garbage bag. then he’d simply buy more clothes! This repeated every few weeks until finally his bedroom & bed were full of black bags. So, he simply flipped his mattress on top of them so he could sleep!
On the bright side, he moved out and I got his rent-controlled lease!
My mom was over burdened when we were young with the PTA and coaching soccer, and a million other philanthropic endeavours. For nearly a year she was also planning a huge community event and she just stopped doing laundry and kept buying us new clothes until one day my father went into the basement to the mountains of laundry 🧺 and began helping a bit :)
@RickiTarr not laundry, but when I was on a coop term I lived with a couple guys. With us it was dishes. It was so bad I think once we went out to buy more rather than wash them. We had a shared bathroom and I needed to go through the kitchen to get to it. One day I was walking through the kitchen and the bathroom smelled so bad I decided I could wait. When I couldn’t anymore I just held my breath. When I had to breathe I prepared for the worst, and then found that the bathroom was actually fine. Walking back into the kitchen I was hit with the smell again, and found that it never was the bathroom at all. It was peas in a closed pot that had probably been there for a couple weeks, and found just before they became sentient.
@RickiTarr my ex-wife was a stay at home mom and I worked full-time outside the home, frequently traveling. When we made the joint decision she would be at home, she offered she would now have more time to devote to domestic duties, including laundry (mine, hers and the three kids). In retrospect I shouldn't have agreed to the deal; it became overwhelming and a source of resentment. Laundry should always be a shared responsibility. Never expect your domestic partner to do it all.
@RickiTarr My mum finally caved and accepted a washing machine in her seventies. She was a lifetime laundromat user. Her new washing machine said the maximum weight of a load was some small amount. Every Saturday morning when she would have been happily in the laundromat chatting to people, she sat at her kitchen table crossly weighing her clothes on her kitchen scales, Making A Point.
I’d love there to be more laundromats. The last one in our little town just closed.
@RickiTarr I know. Every time I visited she would get down her scales with me screeching “Mum! You do not need to be weighing your underwear that is not how this works!” With hindsight I recognise this as protest activism for laundromat use …
@RickiTarr If I don't fold it and put it away right away... I have a few t shirts left over from unpacking that I tossed aside maybe three weeks ago that I step around daily, it would take me 2 minutes to hang them up. I enjoy it when I get started, but 🤷
@RickiTarr Haha great story—and I get the logic leading there!
My embarrassment as an adult who’d never done laundry until moving out was not knowing there’s a lint thingamajig on the dryer you must clear off regularly.
Fortunately, someone alerted me to this rather quickly when she discovered an absurdly thick layer of lint. I was grateful for the intel even if it came with an exasperated denunciation of how easy I’d had it growing up. Oh, lord, her eyes when I explained I was new to laundry.
@Holberg@RickiTarr Hah hah. I think I can top this. I put too much soap in a washing machine on first visit to London as a teenager. Machine burst open disgorging bubbles (didn't notice at first, had my back to it, wet noises underfoot alerted me). I dared disturb old lady in the back who didn't want to be interrupted doing her ironing. GET OUT! But...! Come back at 5.
@RickiTarr My condo I live in for ~25 years had terrible, always broken, communal laundry.
I ended up going to the laundry mat about once or twice a month and using the massive "12 loads at once" washer instead of letting my cloths get destroyed by my HOA.
I think it was Kids in the Hall who had a great "Laundry day fashion show" skit, I wish I could find in online but my google-fu has failed me.
@RickiTarr we decided at one point that it was time to take apart the dryer and clean it out. We'd had it for, oh, ten years at that point. The dryness sensor was busted, but it worked fine on a timer and we didn't want to replace it. YouTube videos were watched, a plan was figured out, we started taking it apart.
We also had a dog with this thick fur that got everywhere, I should mention. And sure enough it was all through the dryer, in behind the drum, in the control area, everywhere. So I grabbed the Shop Vac, plugged it in, and turned it on.
This is how I discovered Shop Vacs have a blow mode.
Electric dryer started drying less and less. There was still hot air, but clothes were damp, the lint in lint trap was damp, and the "condenser" (removable second filter thingy) was filling with water. Cleaned all the vents and such.
Paid the $100 for a tech to come out and look and horribly embarrassed when he pulled out the mesh lint screen I had been clearing, and pointed out it should be see through, not translucent, when clean.
@pseudonym@commonst@RickiTarr brand new dryer wasn't working well after less than a month. Called in the store warranty which covered parts, not labor. He opened it up and read out the voltage across the components and couldn't find anything that had failed. He declared defeat and I looked behind the dryer. Plug was only 1/3 of the way in (thanks, cats). Pushed it in all the way and everything was fine.
@RickiTarr
When our washing machine motor broke and we didn't have money to replace it, my ex husband fixed a bike pedal to the tub, so we could do hand-powered washes for a while.
When we saved up and got a delivery of a new machine and the guys picked up the old one, they sent pictures of our pedal-set-up to all their colleagues, as "they'd never seen anything like it". 😎
@RickiTarr The summer after my first year in college, I had an internship that had dorms but no on-site laundromat. We didn’t have cars so it meant carrying everything to the laundromat in town. Friends of my parents lived closer to my dorm than town. Tom and Carol refused to open the door if I stopped by to visit but didn’t have my laundry. Carol would have me take it to her laundry room where she would wash, dry, and fold my things. No one was allowed to touch her washer and dryer.
@RickiTarr For the first 5 years we were married we were in an apartment and had to do our laundry at a laundromat down the street. Every Sunday afternoon we would go do our laundry and play cards to pass the time. We hated having to go down the street, and thought we had won the lottery when we bought a house that had its own washer and dryer. 27 years later, we recently talked about taking our laundry to a laundromat again, so that we had a reason to play cards.
@RickiTarr Here's another one, not very cheerful, though: after my dad passed, I realized what a terrible laundry situation he had actually been in. He always held a lot of his cards close to his chest, and never really told me about his major troubles, even though I moved back home specifically to help him have an easier life.
He was living with an absurdly old washing machine, and occasionally he would slip up and hint at what he had to do to keep it going. He had these little rituals of jiggling the knob and turning it off and on again to try to get an entire laundry cycle done. I don't know why he refused to replace the washer.
When we were cleaning out his house, I found a small, sad load of five sets of boxer shorts, nothing more, plastered to the inside of the washing machine, dried, but clean.
I also found an entire tub of old tee shirts and jeans that he had basically abandoned because he couldn't wash large loads at all, only the essentials. I brought these home and had to run them two or three times through the washer before giving them away to Goodwill or keeping them for painting rags.
@RickiTarr When I was much younger, I lived with 2 other people-one of them being my husband (ok, I had a menage a trois, except the other woman didn't know it..) and we did not have a washer. Because we didn't have a nearby laundromat, we used to wash our clothes in the bathtub and hang them out to dry either in the bathroom (which was as large as a regular room) or on a line outside. In fact, I didn't have a personal washer or dryer until 9 years ago when we moved into my present house.
@RickiTarr I've only ever used a laundromat once in my life (unless you count the communal laundry facilities when I was in university halls). And that once was when I didn't have anywhere to live for a brief while.
They seem very uncommon here nowadays (although I've heard of some being set up outside big supermarkets, particularly the extra large machines for duvets - but I don't go to big supermarkets or drive so that's not something I have direct experience of).
Otherwise, I've always had a washer at home and I'm very glad of that.
@RickiTarr And the very first time I went back home from uni, I took all my washing with me, because that's what I'd always heard of students doing. But it was a bloody nuisance carrying it, so I never did it again.
@RickiTarr I'm a massage therapist, so daily laundry is essential. I hate to let the massage sheets sit; they can get funky because of the small amount of oil content in the lotion I use.
I won't go to laundromat because I prefer to know what was in the washer before I put my clothes or my work sheets in. I fear picking up nasties going to a public laundromat. I've also had laundromat dryers burn flannel massage sheets!
Earlier this year, some small but expensive part went out on my washer at home. I was unable to do laundry for two whole weeks. I ran through every set of massage sheets I have and almost all of my clothing. It was a particular level of hell.
I ended up squeezing in a few essential loads at my mother's house, 5 miles across town, but her dryer wasn't working, so I hauled semi-dried, spun laundry back to my house to dry. Between us, we had one working set of laundry machines.
It was very clear to me that month that having laundry facilities at home really is a privilege -- and a joy.
I actually like doing laundry and having things fairly well-organized (especially for my work environment). Even folding fitted sheets is fun for me!
@RickiTarr Oh, I did too. When I lived in the mountains in an old hunting a shack, luckily I worked at a place that provided work sheets, so I didn't have to do very much work laundry. But I did a weekly haul of personal laundry over to Nederland or down to Boulder and just sat there reading books. Strangely, it really felt like a simpler time.
Add comment