I am lucky in that I live in a place that allows tenants to have their own washers and dryers. If you’ve ever had to use a common laundry room, or a Laundromat, you know what a big deal this is, and it’s actually on my list of non-negotiables when apartment hunting now. Never again will I subject myself to the laundry thieves and Laundromat Nazis of the world when having your own appliances can be as easy and affordable as a trip to the Salvation Army (or Sears, if you’re a little less broke).
I love the convenience factor of having my own machines right there in my kitchen, and I love even more that my current next-door neighbour is never actually home, and my Landlady upstairs is deaf as a post, so I can run them at any time of day or night without consequence. It’s a nice bonus that with an old shelf laid on top of them, they make an excellent bar and buffet when I have a ton of people over.
If my laundry life is so great, you ask, then why do I cite this as a reason to move?
Because all my outlets and connections are actually not in my apartment. They are in Landlady’s basement, on the other side of my kitchen wall. This means that not only are they completely out of my sight and usually inaccessible if something goes wrong, but also that they are reversed: Hot is right, cold is left, up is down, and so on. Now, if I lived in a building populated by normal people, this wouldn’t be a problem: I would simply have figured it out when setting the appliances up after moving in, made sure everything was installed properly, and put it out of my mind. When I moved in, I did exactly that. The part where I went wrong was assuming that I had moved into a building populated by normal people (although in my defense it was only a few days after moving in, so I hadn’t yet been hit with the full force of my neighbours’ combined insanities, and it still seemed like a reasonable enough assumption).
Cut to one rainy afternoon, a few years later. I am home, cleaning up, and decide to put on a load of laundry. I decide to start with all my super-expensive yoga clothes and really delicate sweaters, since they all need to go in a cold-water, “hand-wash”, no-fabric-softener cycle, and if I do them first then there will be no residual softener or broken-off zipper pulls or button pieces or anything from any other load I would do that day. I take all of these pricey delicates and put them in the washer, add the soap, and press start. I then decide to do a load of dishes, but for some reason there’s no hot water coming from the kitchen sink. I turn to go check the bathroom sink and see if the problem is just in the kitchen, and that’s when I see it.
Steam. Great clouds of steam coming from the washing machine.
I panic, and stop the washer right away, praying that the door lock mechanism will let me open the door and pull my cold-only delicates out of the steaming, scalding water. It doesn’t. It’s more interested in protecting my floor from a tiny flood than in saving easily $1000 worth of clothes (acquired bit by bit over time, don’t judge) from total ruin. I look at the dials on the washing machine, and see that it is set to cold water delicates, as it should be.
I am stumped.
Until I remember hearing people walking around in the basement the day before, coming very close to my kitchen wall, and hearing squeaky pipes.
Luckily, Landlady was home, and let me into the basement right away so I could check things out. Sure enough, the pipes from my washing machine had been un-reversed, so that Hot was left and Cold was right, only this made Hot come out of Cold on my side of the wall. A little bit of chatting to Landlady revealed that she had had her laundry appliances moved up into her kitchen from the basement the previous day, and that she had saved money by having Crusty Old Guy from across the street come do it rather than hiring someone after her own son had refused to do it for her. Clearly, Crusty Old Guy had somehow mistaken my connections for Landlady’s, undone them, found his mistake when trying to move Landlady’s appliances without success, and gone ahead and reconnected mine without checking that they were done as he’d found them.
It was an innocent (but slightly stupid) mistake, and I suppose Crusty Old Guy meant well when he reconnected my machines. But that doesn’t take away my paranoia every time I hear voices behind that wall (and paranoia is exactly what you need if you think you’re hearing voices), and it doesn’t stop me from always checking the water temperature going into the washer as soon as I start a load now. Call me high-maintenance, call me picky and ungrateful and demanding, but I’d kind of like the extra luxury of knowing that when I set my washing machine to cold, cold will come out every time, without fail. I’d like it if my washer/dryer connections were actually in my apartment as originally advertised. I’d really like it if I didn’t have to worry about hearing voices anymore, too.