Making Chores Bearable

You know you have truly entered the world of adulthood when you get excited about buying household appliances.  Our most recent purchase – a new washer and dryer.  The last time I purchased a washer and dryer was in 1999, about a year after I moved into my first apartment without a roommate.  I moved that washer and dryer four times.  When I sold my house, the washer and dryer stayed.  I almost felt guilty.  The poor  new owners probably thought they were getting a great deal.  Little did they know the heating element had gone out twice on the dryer.  The first time my dad fixed it.  The second…well, that happened the week before closing so I paid for someone to fix it since there wasn’t enough time for my dad to come down and do it for me.

The owners we bought our house from left their washer and dryer.  See above for condition of their machines.  We decided to keep theirs rather than move my husband’s set, even though his was only a couple of years old.  We were not at all interested in hauling the old ones out of the basement and moving his down.  We just knew that our first appliance purchase would be the washer/dryer set.

Once we moved in and I started doing the laundry, I realized they were in even worse shape than I thought.  Our house is old and our basement floor slopes toward the floor drains.  Inevitably the washer is always off-balance because of this.  You would think the machine had a life of its own if you saw how far it has moved during a really big load.  You could hear it shaking all the way upstairs and through a closed door.  The dryer required two cycles in order to dry any load regardless of size or fabric type.

So, how did we come to buy a new washer and dryer when we have lived here for over a year?  When I was at the conference last weekend, my husband did the laundry.  He had done loads or parts of loads before, but this was the first time he had done the entire process from beginning to end.  When I got home on Sunday he asked if I wanted to go look at washers and dryers.  If I had known it was going to be that easy I would have asked him to do the laundry when I was at the conference last year!

The delivery truck finally arrived twenty-five minutes after the end of my two-hour delivery window, but I’m not going to complain too much because they hauled the old out and set up the new without hurting themselves or my stairwell ceiling (our steps are very narrow and there is very little headroom…some prior owner remodeled and it’s not up to code…).  And look how pretty they are!  The washing machine is balanced.  They are both so quiet.  They are high-efficiency and have power buttons so they save a little more electricity when they aren’t running.  They have these lovely chimes that sound when you turn them on.

So far, they are working perfectly.  They are so fast.  Sometimes the dryer dries a load of clothes before the washer is done.  I’ve never had a dryer finish a cycle in 36 minutes!  The front load washing machine is a bit different, and I haven’t yet tried the hand wash/wool cycle, which is really what sold me on this set.  However, I am definitely finding it much more bearable to go down into the cold, damp basement to do laundry.  Now if I could find something to make folding, ironing and putting away the laundry easier.  Magic, perhaps?