Stepping Out of the Boat

The information about our apartment said that we would have a washing machine, and naturally, I pictured the thing that you all have in your laundry rooms. My mistake.

The thing in the bathtub to the left is our "washing machine." It does run on electricity, and it washes and spins our clothes, but not without a ton of work. It sits in a little corner in our apartment, and that's where we thought we would use it until, thank goodness, a friend who also teaches at St. Michael's came over and told us that our washer drains out the bottom using gravity. You have to fill it with water using bucket loads and then when it is done washing, you drain it out the bottom into the tub. If we hadn't known to move it, we would have made a very very large mess. So, here are the steps to doing laundry here:
1. Sort all clothes into machine washable and delicate. (All delicate clothing needs to be washed by hand because the machine is rough.
2. Carry the heavy washer from its corner into the bathroom.
3. Lift the washer into the tub.
4. Using approx. four large bucket loads, fill the left side of the washer with water.
5. Add soap.
6. Add clothing.
7. Set the wash timer (we used 12 minutes).
8. Drain washer.
9. Repeat step #4.
10. Add fabric softener.
11. Set the wash timer for the rinse (6 minutes).
12. Drain washer.
13. Put 1/4 of the load into the spin cycle area.
14. Spin 3 minutes.
15. Remove clothing and prepare to hang dry.
16. Repeat steps #13-15 until finished.
17. Start the second load by repeating all steps beginning with #4.
18. Take the finished load up to the roof to hang on the line to dry.
19. When all washing is finished, remove washer from tub.
20. Thoroughly clean the tub.
21. Hand wash all delicate clothing.

It took us 3 hours to do what I would consider two small loads. Wow. We figure most of our clothing won't be worth bringing home with us after a year or two since we sweat so much and we don't know how clean things are really going to get.

We'll put a picture of us on the roof up on another post. We're having trouble uploading the pictures.