Airing our Dirty Laundry

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Alisha

Contributor at Our Paradoxology

Wife of Rod. Mother of Josiah, Selah, Jeremiah, Tallulah, and Eli. Loved by God. Alisha spends her time homeschooling her children, battling technology, and doing laundry.

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Last time I lived in Thailand, I failed to take pictures of the “normal things.” In the years since, I discovered it was difficult to explain the basin of water in the bathroom that we used for bucket showers and flushing the toilet, and I wished I had taken pictures. So every once in a while I am the crazy person who takes pictures of the most uninteresting things I can think of: like laundry drying on a rack. I am also the person who documents the trip to the laundromat with photos of my children. Because there is a story of what God is doing in our lives even there.

When we renovated our home in America, I REALLY wanted a laundry room upstairs. It was one part of a huge process of reworking our home. See, in order to fit a triple bunk bed in the boys’ room (Eli was supposed to come home in 2020), we needed to move a wall and take over some space in the bathroom. This meant reworking the bathroom. The bathroom was sort of awkwardly large (we think it was originally the entire maid quarters of our 1890s home). We had knocked the exterior stairs out at an earlier phase of the renovation, so the bathroom wall included a second story exterior door to nowhere and I thought that wall should be occupied by the washer and dryer. This was totally possible if we also moved the shower and the door to the closet. And rerouted plumbing through 130 year old floorboards. And also rerouted wiring, which meant replacing all the old knob and tube kind (eh, details). A huge benefit of this idea was that by moving the washer and dryer out of the back entryway by the kitchen, we could gain mudroom space for shoes and coats. And since we were redoing that, we could also take over some space from the main level bathroom to create a pantry…as long as we got all new kitchen cabinets in a new arrangement so that we could cut a pantry door where it would need to be. Cutting into all these walls was helpful anyway so that electrical and plumbing could be correctly routed upstairs (yep, details 🙂 ).

My dad and my husband were amazing and worked so hard to accomplish this feat! It was certainly no small task, but I truly loved the finished product SO MUCH! Seriously, it was a game changer EVERY day. I could get a load of laundry done each morning while also aiding Tallulah in getting herself ready. And it was easy to stay on top of getting it all put away because it was seriously only a few steps to each person’s closet. Laundry never had to be toted up and down the stairs and the dirty laundry baskets were right there next to the shower, so it was almost as convenient to put dirty clothes where they belonged rather than leave them all over the floor! It was every bit as wonderful as I hoped it would be.

Then we moved to Thailand. My washing machine is now outside and we don’t have a dryer at all. At first, I had no regular laundry routine. The laundry on the line was never dry by sundown (around 6 pm) so the laundry stayed out all night. In the morning, it housed THOUSANDS of mosquitos who were taking refuge from the smoke and breeding inside our damp clothes. It felt like an accomplishment when I realized that getting the first load of laundry in by 7 am meant I could get two loads on the line in the morning AND they would be dry and ready to be put away at 4 pm. If I did 2 loads a day each weekday, I could stay on top of my family’s laundry needs. I also discovered pretty early that if I took over the front porch with drying racks, I didn’t run the risk of losing my progress to an afternoon rainstorm. Sometimes things need to be rewashed due to the droppings from the birds who nest in this grate thing on the porch ceiling…but not nearly as many as you might suspect based on the number of birds that swoop over my head while I hang the laundry each morning.

That worked through the hottest season and into the early rainy season…but then the truly rainy phase of the rainy season came. Now the laundry can be on the line for days on the porch and not ever be dry, because the air is just wet. All the time. On a sunny day, we can move the racks to the driveway, but it is so difficult to tell when the rain will come: it is a regular occurrence that without a moment’s notice it is pouring–even though the sun is still shining–and we are scrambling to run through the rain to pull in the clothes that are once again drenched. So instead, the laundry often takes over the living room and we use a fan to aid the drying process. This works alright.

There are still details we haven’t figured out. For example, I am still working to figure out how to get some of the funk smell out of dry-fit fabrics, but I think it helped the other day when I boiled a pot of water and soaked the worse offenders in a bucket first (we don’t have a water heater so most of the laundry is washed in cold water).

There was also the glorious day a rogue gecko slithered out of the bundle of socks and underwear I had just brought in to put away in my drawer. And so my boys got to dig around in their mother’s underwear drawer to find it and take it back outside since that gives me the heeby jeebies. Every day brings a new adventure around here.

We have another line strung between two poles under an awning outside where we dry towels. Bed sheets, though, are another challenge. One bed set takes over all the racks… and the sheets get covered with lint residue worse than the clothes do (you know all the stuff that you collect in the lint trap of the dryer? A lot of that ends up on the floor of the porch from shaking each thing out before hanging it…but with sheets it just stays stuck). I have declared that the best way to wash bedsheets is to take them all at once to the Otteri (the name of a chain of laundromats here) and to take advantage of the wall full of dryers!

Tallulah is a grand laundry helper and especially loves to help with the coins.

While it is a whole new system I had to learn and a lot of convenience we left behind, I really don’t hate it. I’ve found a rhythm that sort of works most days and have developed a lot of patience for all the mishaps. Dirty laundry is just one of the many little things in our lives that is both the same as always and also so very very different.