Friday, October 2, 2009

The laundry challenge

Day Nine of 'The Daily Post'.

I love you English and Scottish women! I must admit I'm an American who has been spoiled my entire life by a tumble dryer. I'm reconciling to the idea of line-drying when I move to England in a couple of months. I have one very important question for you, though -- and please don't laugh. What do you do when it is winter and raining or snowing? The "drying cabinent" at my boyfriend's house is small and there are only two radiators that I can put socks on to warm-dry them. Do you have secret clothing lines that come out from trap doors in the halls and extend into the kitchen? I'm not being funny here -- I truly would like to whole-heartedly embrace something that is so good for the environment. I could easily dry my clothing if I had a yard in California as the weather is so nice, but what do you do in stretches of rain?

This was a comment on my post about washing lines. It got me thinking about one aspect of expat life which is a real pain in the ass. It is this. People are used to their own way of life, and find it very hard to explain to a newbie why or how they do things. I found myself wanting to reply to Rachel, the commenter, “It’s hard to explain, but it’s just a question of muddling through. Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.” And then I thought how really frustrating that would be for her.

It took me right back to my early days here, when things that seemed just a part of life to everyone, were compete mysteries to me. Mysteries that they didn’t seem able to explain. Of course part of the frustration is that you can see their point. There are so many things in life that can’t be explained very easily. Or explaining them is just the beginning. What really needs to happen, is for you to jump in, try a few things a few different ways, and then after finding one that works and repeating it for a while, you are just as much an expert as all the rest of them. A little help to get you started is, actually, a big help, but there are no short cuts to experience.

Incidentally, my husband wrote a whole PhD thesis on this very subject. What a waste of those years, when all along he had a wife who could sum it up in a paragraph! I should just have discovered blogging a few years earlier, and we’d have saved ourselves a lot of time and money - though the university might not have awarded him a doctorate and the right to wear a fancy hat on the basis of one paragraph in a blog post. Universities are picky like that.

But back to Rachel. In my early days, I often did pose questions such as hers to the blogging community, because (a) it was a lot quicker and easier than asking 10 local people, and I didn’t even know 10 local people at that point, but it meant I got 10 answers, (b) I got fed up with asking basic questions to people face to face - it didn’t make for great conversation, and (c) I quickly came to realize what a fabulous bunch is out there in the blogosphere, and what top quality answers they gave.

So, on Rachel’s behalf, tell me. How on earth DO we manage to get washing dry, in the British climate, with no tumble dryer? I mean, talk about setting a difficult challenge. Rachel’s boyfriend is already a huge step ahead of me (and I thought I was a pretty impressive laundry operator), because I don’t even know what a ‘drying cabinet’ is. Unless it’s what a Prime Minister appoints if he/she wants to counteract the effects of a government of Tory wets.

Let me start us all off. Rachel, I did have a tumble dryer in Scotland, for emergencies, but I hardly ever used it because there’s this marvellous thing called a drying rack. It’s worth taking time and choosing a good one. By good one, I mean one that will make the maximum use of the space you have available. A lot of people have the rack in the kitchen, where it is a permanent annoyance and gets in the way of whatever you are doing. Other people put it in the bath, where it stands for days on end with semi-dry clothes, because bathrooms are cold and draughty in the UK, and it’s only eternal optimism (see ‘Dunkirk spirit’ in my previous laundry post) that keeps us in the belief that the clothes will actually dry in there. Radiators are a good bet, even if your boyfriend only has two small ones in his small house. As he has perhaps already told you, size isn’t everything.

We Brits are prepared to spend more time and effort on laundry than our US counterparts, so that we are quite happy to get up from the sofa at intervals throughout the evening, even though this means interrupting our viewing of splendid BBC programmes since there are no commercial breaks (which, come to think of it, would actually be useful for laundry purposes), and remove a few dry socks to make space for the next lot of them. We are a bit laundry obsessed, truth be told, so that first thing in the morning, when we get out of bed, our topmost priority isn’t to get the coffee maker on, but to remove the dry socks from the radiators and put out the next batch of damp ones.

As for those secret lines coming out from trap doors, no, we don’t have those but it’s a magnificent idea, which you should develop, take to the Dragons’ Den (UK equivalent of the Sharks’ Tank), and use to make a fortune. Then you and your boyfriend will be able to buy a big house and install a huge tumble dryer in it.

Come on, fabulous British laundry experts. What other tips and advice do you have for Rachel?

20 comments:

  1. We didn't have a tumble drier in London - I simply had a big drying rack which lived pretty much permanently in our bedroom. Unsightly, but you just get used to these things I suppose. Luckily it was quite a warm room, so clothes dried pretty quickly and you could remove them by the time the next lot was ready.

    Here is the US, it's a different story. We have a large drier and it all goes in there, making the washing/drying cycle much quicker and I have to say, easier when you have small kids. But I still have a drying rack for some things, because tumble driers can shrink things and ultimately ruin nice clothes.

    I guess it's just a question of what you are used to, as Iota says.

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  2. ooh, hurrah I'm going to be the 1st commenter. I will tell you what we (used to) have.

    PULLEYS! Sounds even more Heath Robinson than trap doors & secret lines. It's about 6 long poles strung togethe r on a pulley system suspended from the ceiling which you winch down to chest height, put wet laundry on & hoist up to the nether reaches of yr high ceiling. Warm air rises & hey presto, Bob's yr uncle. Come morning it will all be dry! Well it worke dfor my mum, aunt, granny, grandma etc. BUT you need old house s with high ceilings which most of us don't live in now! But that's how it was always done. Lots of older houses also had linen/airing cupboards so you put the clothes in with the boiler & they finish off in there.

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  3. Darn in th etime it took me to correct my typos, NVG beat me to it!

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  4. I love pulleys, had one in a rented house and my granny had one but yes, our ceilings are too low.

    We have a clothes horse as well as the outside line, plus a couple of little racks on radiators.

    Here's the one we have: http://www.lakeland.co.uk/slimline-airer-plus/F/C/washing-laundry/C/washing-laundry-clothes-horses-airers/product/22056

    When folded up, it lives in the kitchen. When open (most of the time) it lives in the dining room and I only move it if we're actually using the dining room. Sometimes visitors come and as our lounge runs into our dining room, they get full view of my bra and pants.

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  5. Love talkinga about laundry. It really is the only household chore I am ever on top of.

    Drying clothes is all about getting organised. Every day must have a wash. You can't expect to do lots on one day. Then you have a good clothes horse (or even 2). Shirts or anything that can be hung should be hung on hangers (leaving more room on horse). Don't be frightened of using the backs of doors etc if needed.

    It has to be said that my house always has clothes drying and hanging around it. Bit of a disaster when people drop round unexpectedly and the old gray bras and knickers are waving around.But when the weather is good then the whole lot goes outside (although maybe not the gray bras and knickers). And I saw the bottom of the laundry basket this summer... it does exist. I had thought it was a portal to another world for a long time.

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  6. Forgot to say, my Mum has a huge airing cupboard of which I am eternally jealous. No good for drying (unless you drape around the boiler in the cupboard which works well but does dry the clothes into a bit of an odd shape, hey ho, after a few years of it you don't notice).

    I think we dry our clothes on lines because none of our houses have enough room for a washing machine and tumble drier and the all in one machines just don't dry properly so you have to hang your clothes out anyway.

    If you'd told me when I was at university I would have as much to enthusiastically say about laundry I'd have been deeply depressed. Now I'm proud and tearing myself away from the keyboard to let other people have a go at commenting.

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  7. One thing I'd like to add, Rachel, is that EVERYONE complains about the drying function on a washer-drier. Because lots of British kitchens aren't big enugh to house a washer and a drier, some clever person invented a machine that does both. But you have to stop the machine after the wash cycle and empty out half the washing, and then the drying is very inadequate (because the machines don't have an outlet, so they have to condense all the water they remove from the clothes, and it seems that that is a multi-tasking bridge too far for them).

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  8. Get a drier! It's ridiculous managing with just pulleys and racks. Washer-drier if you don't have the space (if you get a decent brand, you'll be fine - just don't overfill).

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  9. I just married a Brit this past February and we do not have a tumble dryer. He's a darling man who has built an extension onto his house so I can have a studio space of my own in addition to adding two more bathrooms. He's open to almost all of my decorative suggestions, but the one change I will never expect to see is the addition of a tumble dryer.

    I'm okay with it. You just have to wash early in the day or last thing before bed and get it in an out quickly. We have drying rack and a long bannister across a landing that's perfect for sheets and large towels and lucky for me we have 12 radiators and a rotary washing line outside. Plus we have a big airing cupboard.

    The best thing is to invest in these really great irons (super steamer types) they have over here because everything is stiff and wrinkled.

    Last thing, air dried towels are like drying off with sandpaper. By accident I found when using an almost unscented laundry detergent for babies that it must have a fabric softener in it because now our towels feel great!

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  10. I love it!! (Sorry about the confusing "drying cabinet" -- I actually meant "airing cupboard" which is really just a little room for the boiler and a clothing line that is haphazardly strung next to it.) I love the idea of these pulleys. Brilliant! Iota -- thank you SO much for the post! With the help from you and Lost in Translation -- with your help, Bob's your uncle (can't yet say it without giggling, BTW), I'll be set when I arrive in December. Thank you to everyone for the helpful comments!

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  11. Ooh love this. One of my biggest adjustments in moving to the UK. I bought a drying rack and keep it in front of my supplementary electric heater, the thing that acts when the radiators are not in commission. But it is also useful for direct clothes drying. I do not do more than one load of laundry per day so I have admittedly changed from my American view of "Laundry day" but I manage. No complaints here except for crunchy undergarments. Even with fabric softener I miss soft undies.

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  12. Should have read the other comments, the "drying" function on my British supposed Washer-dryer died in about a minute so the need to air-dry things became important. Ditto what Iota says about why although my machine's manual recommended that I only try to dry 1/3 a load at a time instead of 1/2... I apparently killed the drying function with more than 1/3 loading.

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  13. Oh I second all of this - plus we put chairs near our radiators and hang clothes over the back of them for extra drying power!

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  14. By the way -- intentional or unintentional -- this line made me laugh upon a re-read: "Radiators are a good bet, even if your boyfriend only has two small ones in his small house. As he has perhaps already told you, size isn’t everything." I think there is a good sailing metaphor in there!

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  15. hey quite apart from Dunkirk spirit, if you use scratchy sandpaper towels, you can strike 'exfoliator' off yr shopping list. Dual purpose towels, no mess, & you save time & money.
    I must be very British as I find a good rub down with a 'rough' towel quite invigorating (or maybe I'm just a bit equine...)
    But I do also LOVE a soft fluffy towel onoccasin cos it's such a treat so, GFTJ what's the name of that detergent??
    And Rachel I confess that, sadly, I wasn't even being tongue in cheek when I said 'Bob's yr uncle'it just kind of slipped out.

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  16. This is a subject very close to my heart! I grew up wearing clothes that always felt - and probably smelt - slightly damp ('they'll dry on the way to school'). Tumble driers were an almost unknown commodity in the rural West Country 30 or so years ago. Everyone had Rayburns (think 'primitive Aga') with clothes/sheets/towels permanently drying on top and hanging off the drying rack. My mother is also a manic ironer, and our house was permanently filled with a ceiling skirting layer of steam. I now own a tumble dryer, but use it about three times a year, an image of my mother hovering over me all the while, saying, 'wasteful' time and time again. As Nappy Valley Girl says, you just seem to get used to drying racks hanging around, and learn to dodge them.

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  17. I'm ashamed to say i haven't got a washing line! I do intend to purchase one but i've been saying that for three years now since we moved and i hang my clothes all over the house, door tops, stairs, radiators but nothing beats a tumble dryer :)

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  18. Not a day goes by that I don't yearn for a tumble dryer. I don't trust my neighbours enough to put my clothes out on the drying line, so everything dries on the drying rack. It's not so bad in the winter when the heating is on or in the summer when it's warmish, but in the spring and fall clothes take ages to dry.

    My advice to Rachel - plan ahead if you want to wear something. If you don't, it may still be damp on the day you want to put it on.

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  19. Handy hints to help in the drying process; how about laying a dry towel out flat, spread out wet sweater or jeans and then roll it into a sausage. This is a great way to speed up the drying process and stops the item dripping on to the floor from the clothes horse. It also makes the laundry item lighter and stops it from toppling the clothes horse over.
    Also, ironing damp towels dries them and softens them too.
    Now that I live in the States (grew up in Scotland so hence my laundry expertise!) I have embraced the dryer concept. But if it breaks down I have the skills to fall back on.

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  20. Hello, I happen to be Rachel's little sister. I have already moved to the UK (Scotland) as my husband is a Brit. (It must be a genetic thing, us gals finding british men and moving to the UK!) I had this similar problem when I moved here 4 years ago. Who am I kidding, I still have this problem. I am sensitive to mouldy smells, and when our clothes don't dry properly, they start to smell. We had a big problem drying towels. My solution- I now send my towels and duvet covers to a laundrett! I know, it costs money, but I would rather forsake a few drinks at the pub than have smelly clothes.

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