My apartment is cute, if I do say so myself, and there are so many things I love about it. It's fairly large at approximately 1100 sq feet. It has two bedrooms so out of town guests actually have a place to sleep and spread out, which never happened in my 550 sq foot pad. It has large closets and good storage. It has two floors so if my bed isn't made, no one else has to see it, guests can stay downstairs without invading my private space (that's a HUGE deal for a girl with spacial boundary issues.....) It has Pergo floors downstairs and some really cool abstract art! Overall it's G-R-R-R-E-A-T. BUT, for all of the positives there is one glaring negative:
NO WASHER/DRYER HOOKUPS.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the lovely (annoying) experience of hauling laundry around, let me just state for the record that it STINKS (sometimes quite literally.) Laundry day usually finds me driving 20 minutes to my parents' house and spending several hours making sure my clothes are clean. The whole process can take up an entire day - that's not irritating AT ALL......grrrr. Who wants to spend their entire day off washing clothes? Sure, I could go to the laundromat, but that is ummm, how can I say it? Unappealing. I'd prefer to at least hang out with family (sometimes) while I'm in the process of laundering my scant wardrobe. Plus, my parents have dogs who like to snuggle and make me feel like their life is incomplete without me, no one at the laundromat gives me the same warm fuzzies, and I'm pretty sure I don't want them to! :-) At LEAST I'm not hauling laundry down to the river and scrubbing and beating the dirt out of my clothes with my hands and rocks or something. Knowing that people still do that in other parts of the world helps temper my frustration, usually....
Well on one of those days when my frustration was NOT tempered by the suffering of other people, my friends Laurie and Amy and I were discussing my laundry woes over lunch, because well, girls do that. And let me just tell you that Amy became one of my favorite people ever on that day. Aside from being funny, smart, beautiful and the maker of my favorite goat cheese dip, she filled me in on the wonders of portable washing machines. Yes, you read that right, PORTABLE, as in it hooks up to the kitchen sink. Duh! They do that in Europe all the time and I've seen it, but it never dawned on me that I could buy one for myself. Sometimes I'm so dense....
So guess what I'm doing right now? I'm washing clothes in my very own apartment. I didn't have to drive 20 minutes. I didn't have to haul them to my car. I just walked into my kitchen and loaded my adorable little portable washer with dirty clothes. I've already done 4 loads tonight and I'm so happy I could cry. I even did my own version of the happy dance, which was pretty pathetic but I don't care because my clothes are clean! And even better, the freshly cleaned clothes just get transported up the stairs to my very own portable dryer! Does this sound a little bit like the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right??? Well let me tell you, I bid $585 for both machines and the PRICE WAS RIGHT so I won. Who knew that doing laundry could make a girl wanna dance?
