Venus  and Mars do the laundry

One of the household jobs my husband doesn’t mind doing is laundry. In fact I would go so far as to say he enjoys doing it but as I know many of you will understand his way of doing laundry and mine are very different. We have come to an unspoken agreement that he will not wash my clothes unless I ask him to.

Here are some reasons why:

• He puts my white underwear in with his black jeans
• He doesn’t treat stains
• He loses my socks
• He uses the same machine setting for everything
• He claims not to know which drawers my clothes belong in

  

For a two person household we seem to do an awful lot of washing. My husband is a big man and he goes through a lot of clothes so he has got into the habit of doing laundry at night. Sometimes he does it in the evening but sometimes if he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet he throws a load of jeans and track suit pants in the machine while he’s up. His reasoning is that it saves electricity to wash at that time and I have no argument with that.

I, on the other hand, like to wash in the morning so that I can do other chores while the machine is running and still get everything washed, dried, ironed and put away in the same day.

Last year, after 35 years of managing without one, we bought a dryer. Winters are wet here in our corner of Tasmania and after ten years here I’d come to the point where the sight of a blue sky made me run to put a load of washing in the machine so as not to waste the sunshine. I still like to hang things on the line but the dryer is a blessing in winter. Naturally Hubby also prefers to run the dryer at night to save electricity. Luckily we can’t hear it from our bedroom.

My only quarrel with all this is having washed the clothes and dried the clothes he loses interest and they stay there in the dryer until he needs something. Then he will go and take out the item he requires and leave the rest hanging half in and half out of the dryer.

I am sure you have all read household hints about how to organise the family wash. Each family member has their own laundry basket and once the clothes are sorted and folded they take the basket and put their clothes away. Well the other day I retrieved Hubby’s laundry from the dryer, folded it all neatly and carried the basket to our bedroom for him to put  away.  A day later it was still there. He’ll just take the clothes out of the basket to put them on. Half of them are back in the dirty laundry basket now. I haven’t read any hints about how to fix that problem; none that work anyway.

Occasionally when our washing machine has broken down and often before we bought the dryer we would have to resort to using the local laundry. As I don’t drive we would either go together or it would be Hubby’s job to take our clothes to be washed. He would usually come back fuming because of “inconsiderate people who fill the dryers and then go off for hours” and minus at least one article of clothing, usually one of my socks. I was once very embarrassed to pass the laundry and there, hanging in the window waiting to be claimed, was a pair of Hubby’s very large underpants. If I need to use a dryer that is full I will generally take the clothes out and fold them up neatly. If the owners come back they usually don’t mind and often thank me for taking the trouble to fold everything.

I find going to the laundry can be quite a sociable occasion which is lucky because whenever we go on a trip I seem to spend a lot of time washing clothes. When we’ve stayed at caravan parks on holidays the laundry is the place where I’ve often had interesting chats with other travellers. We once had a very enjoyable conversation with a Canadian in a youth hostel laundry in England while waiting for the world’s slowest dryer cycle to finish. By the time it did we had discovered that the two movies we’d been talking about “Flying High” and “Airplane” were one and the same film! So wash days can be fun when you are on the road and at least I can keep track of the socks!

More Washday Blues:

Here are some wash day stories from other bloggers.

• Washday Blues (mywetherby.com)
• Funny Memories cheer up Washday! (silly9.wordpress.com)
• Monday – no washday for me today (silly9.wordpress.com)