I cannot confidently say when, but
sometime, by the end of the year, perhaps by the start of the school year, I am
going to have a brand new laundry room in my basement. Right now, it’s just
studs, outlining where the walls will be, PVC pipes showing where the whereabouts
of the future utility sink and washing machine will go, and raw electrical
wires with no outlets attached.
This room used to be the kitchen when the
basement was its own apartment, though we’ve expanded it slightly to include
the area under the stairs and to make the entrance on the long wall instead of
at an angle on the corner (this only has meaning to Jamie Kelly and Isaac
Baker, two friends/former coworkers who lived in that apartment). For those of
you who know my house but not the basement, the laundry room will be an exact
duplicate to the dining room on the first floor: roughly 10 by 14 feet.
It’s going to have dove gray cabinets—a whole
wall of base cabinets on the 14-foot wall—we just ordered them last week. (We
can’t have upper cabinets because the ceilings are too low, but may have space
to do some open shelving.) “Dove gray,” I love the sound of that, and what it
means is that the gray has the slightest tinge of beige to it, rather than blue.
The floors are going to be vintage natural
hickory engineered hardwood, just like the playroom and bathroom.
I’m in the process of picking out a wall
color for the whole downstairs, a “warm white,” which kills my colorful spirit,
but with only one window per each room, we need the light to bounce and be
reflected around as much as possible. The electrician assures us we have enough
can lights to make the space completely bright, but we won’t know until the
drywall is up, the walls are painted and the can lights and sconces are
installed. It’s tempting to paint the laundry room a different color—an actual
color—but I’m trying to be reserved. More than anything, I want the room to
look clean and peaceful.
My favorite page of homes magazines is the
one- to two-page picture story about someone’s remodeled laundry room. I’m not
kidding, that’s the part of the magazine that I look at and sigh happily over.
I don’t think I fawned over laundry room articles as a teenager (I’m not
exaggerating, I’ve been a Martha Stewart follower since the mid-90s), but I
realize my distaste for dark and dreary laundry rooms probably started at my
parents’ house, where I took over laundry as my main chore sometime in late
middle school, I believe. My parents live in a split foyer house, with the
basement about 2/3 finished, and the laundry set up in the unfinished part, lit
by a bare bulb, with concrete floor, the room outlined in studs, and the walls
lined with industrial-looking shelves filled with hardware supplies and cheap
armoires stuffed with everything my parents had accumulated since they got
married in the 60s. It wasn’t awful, but it left a lot to be desired.
Especially compared to Martha’s laundry room, which was all white, filled with
bright windows and herbs growing in pots on walls and big glass apothecary jars
filled with homemade detergents like borax and baking soda. Or maybe I’m making
those specifics up. But however her laundry room really looked in the mid- to
late-90s, it looked more like a kitchen than a prison laundry room, which is
what the two major laundry rooms of my life have compared to. (Yes, yes, I see
the irony of bringing up prison and Martha Stewart but cut her some slack, she
did her time and made those other inmates’ lives better by her being there. Not
kidding, I read a book about her time in prison.)
I lived in our current house as a tenant
on the first floor from 2004 to late 2005, and the house had a communal “laundry
room” in the basement, accessible by a separate entrance in the back of the
house, shared by all 3 units. While the majority of the basement had been renovated
and covered with drywall sometime in the 80s, the “laundry room” had not. It
was still cinderblock and spider webs, with no drop ceiling so you could see
all the exposed pipes and the underside of the wood floors on the first floor.
It was small but functional, though it could be tasking for 3 apartments to
share the single washer and dryer. Usually everyone got into their groove
though and there weren’t too many conflicts. Then we moved into another house
divided into 2 apartments, where we now had our own washer and dryer, but they
were crammed into a little bump-out in the only bathroom. It was a finished
space, but with only one light fixture that was only a slight upgrade from a
bare bulb, and the space between the washer and dryer, which face each other,
is just big enough for a laundry basket to fit in. Not ideal, but clean, and
spider-free.
Then in 2009 we moved back to our house,
after finishing converting the 3 units back into a single family home and being
mostly finished the renovations. So
that cramped, unfinished, spidery area became my laundry room again. And let's add on to that the fact that we had demolished the basement apartment and used it as a workshop for the upper floor renovations, and now it looked like the kind of place you would murder someone. And it has
continued to look like murder basement for 8 years, until we got to the framing of the future-renovated basement. Then 2 weeks ago, the plumbers came to
give us our new laundry hook-up pipes and tore the old ones out. Only we haven’t
connected to the new pipes yet. They needed to be virginal to pass the rough-in
inspection, and then to hook them up ourselves (which would include cutting the
PVC pipe and somehow affixing the metal spigots to them and jerry-rigging our
utility sink up to the drain pipe) would be a big hassle, so I said I could
hold out and make do until we get the drywall installed in the basement and can
do a temporary hook-up of the laundry setup until we’re ready for the real and
final set up.
Which leads me to my recent situation,
where I found myself returning to our old apartment this weekend and using our
tenants’ washer while they are away for the week. Big deal, right? So what if I’m
driving 2 blocks back and forth for 5 loads of laundry (it would be just 3
loads at home, but the apartment’s “super capacity” washer is more than 20
years old and its “super capacity” is about 2/3 the capacity of the 10-year-old “super
capacity” washer at our house. At least I didn’t have to go to a laundromat,
right? That’s what I told myself.
And then as I was lugging the 3
hampers from the Highlander to the apartment, I realized that my “Mega Value”-sized
All Free & Clear detergent was leaking. Leaking isn’t the right word.
Blubbering out its contents was more like it. I had affixed the measuring cap
to the spout, put it upright in the least-loaded hamper, and thought that would
guard against spills, but had forgotten that the screw cap at the top was
loosened to allow airflow for the spout and I hadn’t tightened it. At first I
thought it was just spilling into the hamper, which stinks because it’s not
being measured, but I sort of had an “oh well, it’s all going in the same place
anyway” mentality, like when your gravy gets on your carrots and you don’t want
it to but you're not going to make a big deal of it. But then when I lifted the hamper up off the sidewalk, I saw a puddle of
detergent. That’s not good, I thought. And after starting the first load—without
the need of adding any detergent—I went back to the car and saw what looked
like a laundry crime scene.
Did you know that All Free & Clear,
which is clear in color as its name implies, turns purple when spilled all over
the carpet part of your vehicle’s upholstery? The detergent looked like it was under
a black light, and I could see that where the hamper had leaned against the
backside of the trunk-ish part of my SUV, the detergent had escaped the hamper’s
confines (our hampers are just extra-large laundry baskets marketed as “lampers”).
I went inside, grabbed some dirty beach towels from another hamper, and started
mopping up the detergent. And then got another wet towel and tried to dilute
it, and another dry towel and tried to dry it. This went on for about a half an
hour, and seemed to be making very little process. I mean, the towels got
soapier, but it was unclear if the upholstery was getting any less soapy. I
went back inside and spread the soapy towels among what would equate to the 5
loads of laundry of the day. I texted the tale to my mom and she gave me the
sympathy I needed. I waited for the first load to finish spinning, took it out
and put it in a laundry basket to take home and dry in our dryer, and got the
second load in the washer before driving home.
The worst part, of course, was having to
tell Josh about it. Josh is not a clean freak, but he is a detail person. He
has no concept of “good enough,” just “success” and “failure.” My 30-minute
battle with the detergent at the apartment house had led me to believe there
would be no success at getting all of the soap out, and that good enough was
the best we could hope for. At least it wasn’t vomit, I thought. At least it was
unscented. It’s just kind of purplish, and when you touch it, you feel like you
need to wash your hands, which isn’t so bad, because now you have soap on your
hands!
When he heard the news, Josh kept his
level of freaking out to about 60 on a scale of 100 (with 50 being a neutral response), which I thought was pretty
good of him. He realized that the soap would be incredibly difficult to get
out, but that wouldn’t stop him from going at it. “Remember how awful it was
when we spilled the oil in the old Civic?” he brought up, reasoning with me as
to why we should keep working at getting all of the soap out. All that made me
think was “at least it wasn’t oil!” and “oh that’s right, you once spilled oil in our car—I only spilled soap!”
Josh also thought of a bigger fear that I
would never imagined, and he was kind of disappointed when I failed to accept
it as a legitimate fear. Our Highlander is a hybrid, and its electric batteries
are stored under the first row of back seats. What if the detergent soaks through the cracks and gets into the
electric batteries, Josh hypothesized, and
ruins the car??? Then I feel like we would end up in the Guinness Book of
World Records for breaking a car in the most unimaginable way, I internally
responded. Josh worked on the detergent mess for almost two hours, while I kept
driving back and forth from the apartment to retrieve our wet clothes, start
another load, put them in our dryer at home and then folding the whole lot. It’s
not really how either of us wanted to spend our Sunday.
Assuming our vehicle doesn’t break down
from laundry detergent battery corrosion, this will be a day I can laugh about
in a year from now, while I’m folding laundry in my beautiful, sterile,
spider-free laundry room. Or maybe I’ll just be hiding out in there, sipping on
wine and doing some crafts. Or making wine, like we used to do before kids. Or
making gin!
But if I'm making gin, I probably won’t remember the day I
spilled half the laundry detergent bottle in the backseat of the car at all.
