A peek inside our London Manor continues. This week we will take a little tour with a couple of the mechanicals that keep the manor humming. Laundry is the job that never ends. However, we are lucky that our house came with a washer and separate dryer. Yes, we are lucky.
The washer is a standard issue front-loading washer. It does not fit much in the way of my top loader at The 407, but it does a fine job cleaning. The pièce de résistance is the tumble dryer. On our home searches very few had dryers, and I did a happy dance when we realized we picked a place that had one. I can give up a lot of things, but a proper dryer is not one of them. It is a difficult idea to wrap your brain around if not having a dryer is an extremely foreign concept. I know, for a fact, that many households do not have dryers at all. How do they do laundry, you ask? Those without a dryer have two alternatives:
- A washer and foldable drying rack - Everything gets hung to air dry. I like to hang a lot of my clothes to dry, but there are some things that deserve a warm dry. I certainly think socks and undies deserve a warm tumble as air dried laundry items have a certain crunchy element to them.
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| Laundry from back in the apartment - never a good spot to put this |
- A washer/dryer in the same unit - When the wash cycle ends, it switches into heat mode for the dryer. We had one of these in our corporate apartment; it was not ideal, but better than nothing. If you've ever tried drying laundry with a hair dryer you have an idea of the quality. I ran clothes through a dry cycle then hung them on the foldable rack so I could do more than one load of laundry per day.
The dryer at our house is not without it's own idiosyncrasy. This bad boy is known as a condensing dryer. The vapors do not vent to the outside, they magically condense back into a water tank that has to be emptied every three to four loads. The condensing reservoir is a little heavy and unwieldily to empty. I always get the back door open before I remove it so I don't spill all over the floor.
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| The reservoir is full |
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| I think it weighs 5kg (about 10 pounds) when full |
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| I'll use the water for the flowers when we get some |
All in all, it's a creature comfort I'm glad is at my house. Stay tuned for next time; we can explore the kitchen! Try to not lose sleep whilst you wait.
This is funny to me because it's the thing that's bothered me the most about living in London and the thing I've found hardest to adapt to! Our temp flat came with a washer/dryer combo that was practically useless. Our clothes would come out "dry" and we'd still have to hang them over door frames and on door handles to dry them! Now we just have a washer and hang dry everything but I grumble about it nearly every time! I never in a million years would have figured laundry to be my biggest complaint about living in England! ;o)
ReplyDeleteAgreed Sarah! I suppose if that's the worst of it, then life is good! Then again, don't get me started on the 4 pint milk jugs. Do I really have to buy milk every day?!
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