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Sunday, March 25, 2012

Wash and dry

When we were shopping around for apartments, almost every option had some flaws. Most were simply too small to contemplate. Some were too expensive, given our mortgage. Others were located in areas that were too urban for our liking, or on the fifth floor, or in a dungeon-like basement, or in the wrong school district. Our current place, as I've said, has some flaws of its own, but it fit the bill in many other ways.

However, when I was looking at all these apartments, I failed to (re)consider the laundry situation. And oh, my kingdom for a washer/dryer in my very own apartment! In our current building, there are two coin-operated laundry rooms for ten units, each with one washer and one dryer. Each unit is assigned a day of the week to do laundry, with Saturdays and Sundays available first come, first served. In a perfect world, my assigned day would be Wednesday, and then I would use the weekends to catch the inevitable messes that happen with two little boys. Sadly, my assigned day is Friday. So I have bales and bales of laundry to do, most of it stained because it got dirty much earlier in the week. And every Friday is a laundry marathon. I'm always racing the clock, trying to get it all done before the room "closes" at 9pm because we live in a building in which the husband and I are probably the youngest residents after the boys and though they SAY it's nice to hear the sounds of little boys again, what they MEAN is that they hear the sounds of little boys, whether it's nice or not.

Doing laundry this way has necessitated other changes besides in our schedule. For one, I've had to open up a local bank account for the first time in ages, just so I could get quarters in large numbers. I walked into the closest bank, set up a bare bones account with the minimum deposit and walked out with $100 in quarters. I'll probably have to go back in a few weeks and restock. But, otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get them at all. Sigh. And there's a play group here of moms from church, but they meet on Friday mornings, so I've only managed to go once, and that visit meant I was literally doing laundry every single moment I was in the house that day from 7am until 9pm. Even longer sigh.

Those apartments that were slightly more expensive but had a washer and dryer in the unit? Totally worth it. Lesson learned!

1 comment:

joyful704 said...

i am so sorry.