Our washer died.
It was a cute little European model, a combination washer and dryer. It was a good washer. A terrible dryer. But it got the clothes clean.
It looked smart and efficient tucked under the counter in our kitchen.
It came with the house. It was in fact, one of the few things that didn't contribute to that bottomless money pit.
There are some things I've refused to do in my adulthood: mow the lawn, shovel snow, and drag my dirty clothes out to a public place where I have to shove quarters into a machine that God only knows in who has washed God only knows what. So naturally, when the washer died, I jumped on line to see what new washers were available that would fit under our counter.
Buying the same model we had before turned out to be a little on the pricey side, so I looked around and settled on a less expensive portable washer.
Clyde and I live modestly but comfortably. We don't have a lot of debt. We eat out and travel. But our house is small. We don't drive fancy cars. And we don't waste money on deluxe washers.
Turns out this new little washer is too small to to reach the kitchen plumbing. It has to be dragged into the bathroom, hooked up to that sink, and drained into the bathtub. But it fits under the counter and it was cheap.
It is a lot smaller than I expected. It holds about a third of what the old washer did. So we have to do smaller loads. Clyde thinks it's cute. It looks like R2D2. It took a few days to figure out exactly how to hook it to the sink - turns out we didn't have the right attachment for the faucet. I went to Home Depot and came home with the wrong size. Don't ever send me to Home Depot. I'm a disaster at Home Depot.
The laundry was piling up.
Clyde managed to find the right size faucet attachment at McGuckin's Hardware in Boulder.
After much trial and error, I was finally able to hook up the new machine. I plugged it in. I attached one end of the hose to the sink and the other end to the little washer. I set the program to wash, rinse, and spin. I turned on the faucet. Water shot me in the face, blasted the wall, the shower curtain, and the floor.
I tightened the hose. Tighter. Tighter. Finally, a little water dribbled into the washer. My shirt was soaked.
Tighter, tighter. My finger started to bleed.
So it turns out the laundromat isn't so bad. You can put a 20 into a machine that churns out a whole bunch of quarters. The washers and dryers are huge so you can do a lot of clothes at once. The other customers are mostly nice. For extra convenience, there's an "all natural 'green' medicinal and recreational health clinic" next door. For those of you who don't live in Colorado, that means it's a marijuana shop.
R2D2 remains under the counter for emergencies. If you cover the sink and the hose with a towel while you use it, water doesn't spray all over the place. I'm still looking for ways to make it better. I might go over to Home Depot and see if they have a better hose.
