laundry room blues
I frelling hate doing the laundry.
This is not an overstatement. I think it is the worst thing I have to do on a regular basis.
When we lived in Vanier House in Edmonton, we had a proper laundry room on the top floor of the building. There were 42 units in the building and 5 washing machines and 4 dryers. It got busy on saturdays, but you could get all your loads washed at once by using several washing machines. The dryers were large and could do 2 loads at once. We had a table where we could fold our clothing if we wanted. Best of all it cost 75 cents to wash and 50 cents to dry.
When we lived in our house in Edmonton, we had a washer and dryer in the basement which we could access any time we wanted and it was great.
Here in our Montreal apartment, thngs are a bit different. The price for 1 load of washing or drying is $1.25. There is one washer and 1 dryer for all 15 apartments and they are always busy. They are in a nastly little room in the basement with a dirty floor (it probably gets cleaned once a year) and very poor lighting. The dryer sucks and it takes 2 turns (1 hour each time) to dry one load of washing.
Every 2 weeks I force myself to go into this horrible little room and try to get stain remover on our clothes without letting them touch the ground but without the use of a table (or anything, for that matter) to put them on and very poor lighting too. It takes about 3 and a half hours to get all the laundry done and I have to go down every half an hour to take loads of washing out or put more money in the dryer.
As if all of this were not enough, the cost of a load of laundry is so high and the use of the machines so limited that I usually do two loads, one “darks” and one with light colours, cleaning cloths, whites and linty things. I do this because if I put anything linty (e.g. Dan’s socks) in with the darks then everything is covered with grey lint. Of course this is not good for the whites, but I don’t have much of a choice. Nvertheless, there are still white detergent stains and lint all over my darks which are very difficult to get out.
Next apartment, I am going to be a little more selective when it comes to the laundry facilities.