Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Every rose has it's thorns

We are loving the new apartment. Really loving it! The garden is lovely, the furniture is comfy, the big screen TV is perfect for watching the olympics, the hard floors (no more spills on the carpet!) are amazing, and the dishwasher has revolutionized the way I feel about being in the kitchen. We really, really like it. Of course, no apartment, or house, is without it's flaws. The biggest one here so far is the laundry. In Boulder we spent $1 for wash and $1 for dry to do our laundry. That seemed a little expensive/annoying to me but it was cheaper than the laundromat, so, whatever... Our last apartment had free laundry. Which would have been really nice if it wasn't so far away (3 flights of stairs and around the building). This apartment however, does not have free laundry. Nor is it $2 a load. The laundry here is 1€ for 20 minutes. A normal cotton wash with this machine is 2 hours (?!). That means 6€ (roughly $7.50) just to wash. Drying usually takes about 60 minutes, so that's another €3 for a total of 9€ for ONE load of laundry. There's absolutely no way I will spend that much on one load of laundry. I could almost buy new clothes for that much (well not really, but still...). So I've taken up line drying my clothes, and I've been washing them on the super short cycle. So far I've done three loads of laundry on the super short cycle (it says it takes 15 minutes, but actually takes 27, weird...) two of the three loads came out completely sopping wet. The other one was fine. I'm not sure what that's about, I'll have to look into it more I guess. The line drying has been fine. The super sopping wet load took a couple days to dry, the other one dried in an afternoon.

I have very little experience with any laundry washing that doesn't involve dumping into the washer and then transferring to the drier. There's a big square clothes line thing in the yard I've been using for drying the clothes, and I've just been hanging everything out there. I have no idea what I'll do in the winter. Are there enough sunny days in the winter to line dry your clothes? Do you really stand out there in the freezing cold and pin every shirt and pair of underwear up? What about weeks where it's rainy all week? I have a "winter garden" a kind of sunroom/porch thing that's all enclosed but with windows all around and on top. Would that be a good place to dry clothes? Or would it take years for them to get dry since it's inside? It's also pretty humid here, how is that going to effect things? Is there a way to make the super short cycle more efficient, like something I can add to make the clothes get cleaner faster? We're talking about pretty dirty little boy clothes.  These are all questions for, well, I guess for you. Surely there are some experienced launderers amongst my blog readers, right?! Email me, Facebook me, Skype me, comment, I need some serious help in this department!

4 comments:

  1. Is it a problem w/ the washer? Is there someone you can ask about it? In my old apartment building we had 10 or so washers to choose from - some worked great and others not so much.

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  2. You might want to look into buying a cheap washer off ebay if you have a water hook up available as that might be a much cheaper choice. There are very cheap drying racks available at the store since lots of people don't own dryers here and I would try to dry them in your winter garden in the winter- maybe have a fan blowing on them if you think the room is too damp. I also have dried clothes in the bathroom with the ventilator on which worked OK.

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  3. OxyClean added to your detergent helps with the cleaning for sure... so I guess it would help clean faster... I guess...

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  4. I've been without a dryer for many long periods of time, including this year. My most helpful trick is to "fluff" everything before hanging by shaking them hard-especially towels! You should be fine hanging stuff on a drying rack in the veranda during the winter--Ashley's fan suggestion is a good one if the humidity is problematic.
    The only time I lived without a washer was in Thailand. I combined my shower with laundry, shampoo for my head, detergent for the clothes in a bucket which I agitated with my feet--made long showers productive ;) I wonder if the boys would find stomping the laundry after they've rinsed a wonderful development? Assuming you have a bathtub. You may need to check that the detergent is hand-wash friendly (some detergents are bad for your skin in concentration-but I think Europe is all about happy non-toxic things, so probably you are fine). I found that I still took my clothes to a machine every few months just to get it really clean with less effort, but then again, I didn't have a washboard or utility sink. Old fashioned washboards really are amazing. If you washed frequent stuff like underwear, socks and tee-shirts by hand during bath-time, that might be an easy way to start, and just reduce the amount that has to go in the machine.
    Haha. Guess I like talking about laundry ;) Hope you find a good solution!
    ~christa

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