Laundry Day

In our 2700 square foot house with a nice Maytag washer and dryer set, laundry day started at sunrise and ended well into the night.  We average seven to ten loads of laundry a week and find it easiest to complete it all in one day.  The task of laundry day requires someone to be home all day, which is a nightmare for my wife, and more impressively it necessitates remembering to keep up with it (or risk two days of this drudgery).  Nevertheless, this is a task that has to be completed by every family, including ours.

Since leaving our castlette, laundry day has changed a little.  Did you know that most travel trailers do not come equipped with laundry facilities?  We have to find another way to complete this task and two options are available.

Option one: Laundromat
This option is quite the learning experience for the whole family.  Five 30lb washers are full of our clothes and all the free drying we need.  We blaze through our laundry at top speed and have ten loads of laundry washed, dried, and sorted (we no longer believe in folding) in under two hours.  While at the Laundromat we have been able to eat dinner, buy some “fresh “ fruit from children wandering through and attend an ESL (English as a Second Language) class.  On this evening, I think we were the only people in the place who speak English as a first language.  Spanish is most prevalent, but there is another which I cannot identify at all.  Since when is laundry day a cultural experience.

Option two: Campground facilities
Again, we have seven to ten loads of laundry per week.  Six top loading washers put a good dent in that, but we need more!  It is close to our home and open twenty-four hours a day.  With a thirty minute wash and a forty-five minute dry, our laundry is finished in under one and a half hours.  That is actually only true if laundry day comes every five or six days.  The downside involves finding assorted unmentionables in our laundry that belong to complete strangers.  Oh well, finders keepers!

Our intention was to minimize the number of articles of clothing that each person has in the trailer.  We reduced our total number of clothes dramatically before moving, but we are still hemorrhaging clothes.  We have said this downsizing is a process.  While everything we own now fits into 390 square feet (our travel trailer and a 10X10 storage unit), I still feel we have too much stuff, clothes especially.