The Cost of Clean Clothing

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.


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.

Dying Dishwasher Spurs Appliance Crisis

 When I remodeled my kitchen, the green dishwasher which melted all of my plastics was replaced with a white one that had heat control; the green stove featuring uneven metal coil burners was discarded in favor of a white model with a smooth glass top; the green fridge sporting metal shelves was replaced by an energy efficient white unit containing glass shelving. All the cheap dark corkboard cupboards and drawers were replaced with European style (or so I was told) glossy beige and blue ones.

My modern kitchen!

As a relatively new homeowner, I felt like I had taken a big step towards transforming the dumpy fixer-upper where I lived into a showpiece home.

That was 12 years ago. Since then, every three or four years, I've done a major remodel on a different part of the condo, the most expensive of which was the bathroom, itself worthy of a separate writing.

Thing is, though, I'm wondering if it's time to start all over and again invest in the kitchen.

I'm asking because the "new" dishwasher I got in 2000 is making a loud noise - like a death rattle. Recent Thanksgiving guests could barely converse without shouting over the rhythmic clang-chunk, clang-chunk, clang-chunk sound.

Do all appliances age at the same rate? Will I have to replace everything at the same time?

My worst fear is not the cost, but whether I have the nerve to empty the freezer. See, I love to freeze stuff. I really like the idea of being prepared for that blizzard which strands me in the house for several days with lots of frozen soup on which to survive. So every time I cook, I set something aside and stick it in the freezer. It feels very secure, like money in the bank.

The problem, however, is that I don't take stuff out as much as I put stuff in. It gets to the point where I'm cramming and shoving just to make room for a sandwich baggie of leftovers.

I recently found a jar of unidentified frozen substance that I was pretty sure predated the last couple of blizzards. I thought about thawing it to save the jar, but decided it was too gross to contemplate. I threw it away to make room for a baggie.

There are also a couple pounds of meat someone gave me in 2010. I don't know how long they had it before that. I've heard of people eating 10,000 year old mastodon found frozen in a glacier. The meat in my freezer isn't that old, but I'm still not sure how long I should keep it.

Way in the back of the freezer, I fear, could be items dating back to the Clinton administration.

As I foraged for a snack one afternoon, I found an old ice cream sandwich. It looked ok. But when I bit into it, my teeth encountered something completely dry, spongy, and flavorless. All ice cream had been defrosted away, leaving nothing but a scummy white shell between ancient husks of wafer. I gagged on what was basically a mummified frozen snack. I only finished it because I was hungry.

 Epilogue: The good news is I have cleaned out the freezer and now it's nearly empty. The bad news: they are predicting snow this weekend.