Airing our Dirty Laundry

Before I start on today’s post,  I wanted to let you know that the eggs in the nest on the front covered porch hatched yesterday! I can see 4, maybe 5 teeny tiny naked birds no bigger than a nickel!

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As with most everything, our Little House provides benefits for some things being handy, other things, not so handy.

Take the laundry, which is one of my least favorite things to do. About the only thing I enjoy about it is having it folded and put away until next time.

At our house in the city, we literally had enough clothes in our closets that allowed me to sometimes let the laundry go for up to 3 weeks at a time. Of course, Dale had uniforms where he worked and they did that dirty, oily laundry, so it was mainly my clothes and his weekend wear.

Here at our Little House, we don’t have much closet or dresser space and I can barely scoot past the dirty chore for more than a week. As well, there isn’t room to put many dirty clothes – unlike our house in the city – where the clothesbasket was in a spare bedroom where I could just shut the door.

Emma looking regal

The final downside here is that Emma, our brave Rottweiler/German Shepherd mix is terrified of the sound of the washer. I have no idea why. I tell her I’m scared of it too, but I don’t get to run away from it like she does! She usually goes and hangs out at The Belle Writer’s Studio while I’m doing the laundry.

The best part is that my laundry closet is in the kitchen, just steps from the bedroom closet and it is oh, so easy to get clothes in and out. This is also unlike our old home, where the laundry room was in the back corner of the basement, which required trips up and down stairs.

Last week, Dale told me when he was already out of clothes that he didn’t have anything else to wear.

“Why can’t you give me at least a day’s notice that you’re out of clothes?”
He looked at me like I was loony. “You should just know when you haven’t done the laundry for awhile.”

Argh. As if my mind isn’t in a thousand other places.

This week, he told me yesterday that he would be out of clothes today. At least he gave me day’s notice, and so it goes.

Some of you might be wondering why I don’t tell him to wash his own clothes. The fact is, this is the only household chore he is completely banned from touching.

When we were first married, I told him to do some laundry one Saturday when I was working overtime at my corporate nightmare.

He not only washed reds with whites and turned almost everything we owned pink, but dried my shirts in the dryer (including a silk blouse that was in the dry cleaning pile) and shrunk every last one.

He hasn’t been allowed to do a load of laundry since.

I’ve had a few disasters as well. Also early in our marriage, I washed his paycheck, on the week we needed to pay our rent.

I’ve also put an ink pen through the wash and a package or two of gum.

Now I check the pockets each time, although we are both pretty good at emptying them.

Leaves nothing for us to argue about then when it has to get done.

What’s the worst thing you’ve put through the washer or dryer?