Today marks a passing through of a threshold.
I’m am listening to the sounds of my first load of laundry by a new washing machine that I bought from the Sears outlet store.
Truly phenomenal. Truly thirty.
But let me back up a couple of months.
I live in a great little pad. A block away from the ocean, lots of room, big windows; pretty much everything I could ask for. There’s even a laundry room!
But that’s where the catch lies: Laundry room, no washer or dryer.
I thought this was a little crazy, that is until I heard that in Australia rental suites don’t even come with refrigerators or stoves! You’ve got to drag around your own appliances. Which is perhaps helpful if you grow weary of moving into a new place every 6 months.
A friend in town (actually the former tenant of my place) told me he would sell me his washing machine. But he hadn’t a dryer.
One thing after another lead to the swap falling through, and I moved clumsily into the realm of used washer/dryers from the local paper.
Clumsy may be the wrong descriptor. Rather, it was a completely fruitless exercise as the thought of cold-calling strangers to talk about their gross appliances left me completely uninspired.
To be honest, I didn’t call a single person.
Last time Craig was in town, he took me to the Sears outlet and we looked at washing machines and dryers. We heard the sales pitches, I felt enthusiastic but aghast at the thought of dropping at least a thousand dollars on a pair of big, white, adult boxes.
So I waited and waited and waited.
And all this while I was stuffing my giant backpack full of clothes & heaving it downtown to the King Koin laundromat.
It’s not a bad laundromat, so far as laundromats go. But I could not take another afternoon having my ears talked off by the lovely and chatty “launderers”.
Last time I was there I heard the entire work history of a 60 year old man who’s been working at King Koin for 28 years. Two good things come of conversations like this: a dose of gossip and a chance to see the inner machinations of a 20 year old industrial dryer.
But little else … unless you count random browsing at the Zellers.
But that chapter ended minutes ago when I heard my laundry hit the spin cycle.
Glory be, I’m my own laundress now.
Congrats on your grown-up purchase. Nothing like only going a few steps to clean your clothes! Enjoy!
you know, i live right behind a used appliance store and often as i walk by i check out the compact washer dryer set, the kind they build one on top of the other. and i’ve soooo thought of buying them. but i’ve got nowhere to put them. i’ve even started thinking of knocking out a wall in my storage alcove just off the kitchen. so far it’s only dreaming, but hey, i commend the moving forward into appliance purchases.