A Dirty Joke

Before we moved in, our landlord supplied a new washer-dryer, which is installed in one of the kitchen cabinets. Note that I said 'washer-dryer', not 'washer-AND-dryer'. This machine is a single unit, which is designed to save space, water, energy and, by extension, the entire planet. This machine also a useless piece of crap.

Now, I must point out that this is not the fault of the landlord. It's pretty much a standard issue unit, and I don't think it was cheap. I must admit that the idea of a single unit that does both washing and drying does have a certain appeal. Many times I opened the lid of our old washer only to find towels that had been washed days earlier growing moldy from the damp. The trouble is, because the new unit is so energy efficient and, well, just do darned small, it takes all day to do a load of laundry. Last weekend, I washed 2 bath towels, a hand towel and a couple of washcloths and it took over four hours.

As you might imagine, with 2 adults and 2 kids, we generate a lot of laundry. Maybe Brits don't wash their clothes every time they wear them. I don't have a problem with that - I rewear my jeans and t-shirts several times before I throw them in the laundry. I picked up this habit in college, when my laundry money and my drinking money came from the same source. But with kids it's different. I'm not sure where the ick comes from on their clothes, but it's a rare day that we don't have to either wring out or scrape off some unidentifiable remnant of food or, well, I just don't want to think about what else it could be.

Point is, we generate laundry faster than we can clean it. The instructions are pretty explicit - don't put more than 2.5 Kg in if you're going to use the dryer function. For you metrically challenged folks, that's a little over 5 pounds. 5 lbs. just ain't a whole lot of laundry. When we first arrived, we had so much laundry (from staying in the hotel and with family before we left) that we ran the thing constantly. I think we did 10 loads in the first two days. The dryer takes so long that we resorted to hanging clothes on a wire clothes rack left over from the previous tenants.

Interestingly, though, we seem to have gotten used to it. Rather than doing laundry once a week as we did in the US, we do it every day. Several times. It's worthy of comment now when the washer isn't running. It feels like something is missing. So I guess we're settling in.