The Laundry Shuffle

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Renovation progress is grudging here at the Manor. The lack of progress means we’re now fixing things we’ll end up renovating. It’s highly annoying. That frustration does bring home the reminder that we need to prioritize house projects in the big scheme of our schedule because we’re getting nowhere. And if you’ve followed along here for any length of time you know I do not like being stuck.

Bane of my existence

I detested the laundromat days that ran our life when we set out on the road. My dear man didn’t mind it as much but it seriously frosted my flakes. For over four years we were without our own laundry machines. For those four years as full-timers and home renovators, our lives were dominated by laundry day. The process of gathering everything, traveling to a laundromat, washing, drying, folding, traveling back home, and putting everything away took many hours, not including travel time depending on where we were camped. When we were on the road, there were times a laundromat would be over an hour away. Not fun. And certainly not the best use of our time.

Once we settled into the house, our laundry scenario became much more predictable. We got it down to the most efficient routine possible but it still took about several hours all-told. The glitch is that I have a lot of demands on my time and calendar. Scheduling those chunks of time to manage the whole laundry process were insanely problematic and a great source of stress. I worked hard to make the best use of that time in the lulls while the laundromat machines were performing their duties, but it took a lot of mental cycles to do that.

And yes, I realize that’s a very first-world problem. But since I live in the first world, well, that’s my context.

Are we there yet?

We’ve been in the house for 3 years at this point. We designed the kitchen and have had the cabinets here for two years. We simply haven’t been able to carve out a dedicated window of time to take on the project. What we don’t want is to demolish the kitchen, get sidetracked with other work and life issues, then have it take a year to get it renovated and be without a kitchen that whole time. The idea is to block a window on the calendar to take the project from “old kitchen” status to functional-if-not-entirely-complete “new kitchen” status in the shortest time possible.

So you’re probably asking, “Val, what the ever-loving shit does the kitchen remodel have to do with not having laundry machines?” Well, I’ll tell you.

Laundry machinations

The Manor was built in the 1970s and in true 1970s style, there’s simply no other place to put laundry machines except the damn kitchen.

The house was designed with the laundry hookups at the far end of our galley kitchen. Along the way in the house history, someone moved the laundry setup to the garage. They simply closed up the plumbing in the kitchen and opened it up in the garage just on the other side of the wall.

Unfortunately, that puts the machines right in front of the overhead garage door. The depth of the machines, along with space for hoses and cords, means having the machines in that position renders the garage absolutely useless for vehicles. Not even the two-wheeled bikes would be able to roll in, much less the sidecar.

Having a least a one-car garage for the motorcycles was one of the reasons we bought the house so clearly we have to move the laundry machines back to the kitchen. With that in mind, we designed the new kitchen with space for European-style front-loading, under-counter machines. They’re smaller than typical American machines and we’ll still have to go to the laundromat on occasion to wash bulkier items but that’s a reasonable compromise under the circumstances.

But of course, here we are, a full two years with the kitchen project laying in wait and no progress on the horizon towards making this all come together.

Temporary fix

One day back in December, we got a text from our lovely and amazing neighbors. They had decided to upgrade their washer and dryer and were wondering if we knew of anyone who could use some free laundry machines.

I couldn’t think of anyone off-hand but thought, “Damn, I would fucking love to have those machines.” Initially it was a lament. But in fact, it planted the seed for progress. My mind raced. What would it take to install these machines, even if they were temporary?

The machines are the standard, top-loading washer and front-loading dryer with the control panels on top. The most obvious obstacle to shoving them into the kitchen was that we’d have to remove a couple of base cabinets along with a large section of countertop. In our small kitchen that would be a pretty big sacrifice, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker.

The next obstacle would be converting the hookups back into the kitchen from the garage. I did some quick poking around and realized that wasn’t actually a big deal at all. It was really only a matter of reopening the wall on the kitchen side and closing up the hole left behind in the garage. We’d have to turn the outlets around, but the plumbing connections were still agreeable.

Obstacle number three was the dryer vent. Our plan is for a heat pump dryer that won’t require a traditional vent to the exterior. So, of course, when we had the house re-stuccoed, we told the contractor to cover the vent hole in the side of the house. “Are you sure?” they asked with a puzzled look. “Oh yeah, we’re sure!” we replied enthusiastically. Joke’s on us, right?

So close

Those obstacles all together felt a bit daunting but eventually my dear man saw the wisdom in overcoming them. He really didn’t want to do the project but he realized it was the right thing to do given how far out we still are from the kitchen renovation, my intense hatred of laundromat runs, and the constant stress it was putting on me to constantly ram those days into my busy schedule.

We told the neighbors we’d take the washer and dryer and began planning the conversion process. In actuality, we couldn’t do a whole lot until our neighbors new machines arrived and we took possession of their old ones. We didn’t want to make logistical decisions like how much counter to remove with some of the question marks we had surrounding exactly how they would fit.

Once we were in possession of the machines, my dear man dug in and figured out everything we needed. Being in a fairly remote area, we couldn’t source all the parts locally, particularly to craft a proper dryer vent so there were some delays in waiting for bits and pieces to arrive.

I was practically salivating over the machines sitting in our dining room in the meantime. The delays were emotionally taxing given how badly I wanted those machines running. When we had to do one more laundromat day in the transition process, I wanted to bawl like a toddler who dropped her ice cream cone in the mud. And I’m not a cryer.

The glory of in-house laundry

And then—finally—the glorious day arrived. My dear man got everything running and we did laundry at home for the first time in over four years. After being stuck for so long, the bliss of relief washed over us. (Pun entirely intended, by the way.) Even though it was a weird, temporary half-step forward, it was forward. And it was an extremely powerful momentum-builder.

Six months later I still get verklempt thinking of that day. And I will forever be grateful to our amazing neighbors. We have the agreement with them that once we’re done with the machines, we’ll pass them on to someone else in need of the same glorious relief.

Hindsight

So now you’re asking yourself “Why the hell didn’t they just get some machines from the beginning?”

Well, first off, we never thought it would take this long to get the kitchen done. We also didn’t want to bring in machines we’d have to move and store in our limited space during renovation. Plus keeping the shiny, new treasures from getting damaged in the chaos would be nearly impossible.

The allure of free, temporary machines shook us out of our rut, though. Realizing that putting some effort into a temporary scenario would be a net positive was a game changer.

And it’s been totally worth it. The loss of counter space has taken some getting used to but it has proven to be the reasonable trade-off we thought it would be.

What’s next?

So how do we move forward on this beast of a renovation now that we pressed the laundry relief valve? Well, we should probably get the damn kitchen renovated! That’s locked behind a few dependencies—carving that elusive block on the calendar and the need for electrical work that has to happen first.

One of the bigger revelations we’ve had in recent months that we hadn’t accounted for is that we’re hobbled by lack of space to work. Since we downsized so tremendously from our life in Dayton, we’re packed to the gills in the house. We don’t have any wiggle room to move things around and create the work area we need to take on such a big project. That was definitely not in the brochure.

More on that next time. Stay tuned.

Cheers! Keep moving forward, y’all.