Washing Wednesdays

Now for the long awaited post about our washing machine!  Since we have moved to the big city, we now have to deal with limited water.  In our old town, we lived right on the sea and an aquifer so we had unlimited water.  Now that we are in the city and miles and miles from the nearest source of water with millions of people to water, we are limited.  Unfortunately, our first full week here we found out just how much this limited water affects us when we ran out on a Monday night and found out our tanks wouldn't be refilled until Wednesday.  Wednesday is when the water comes to our area of the city, so we can use as much water as we want on Wednesdays and it won't affect the rest of our week on the tank.  With that in mind, Wednesdays is when I try to get all the laundry and cleaning done.  So, without further ado, here's the procedure for laundry these days :)

Here's my washing machine (in the bathroom)

First things first, I have to plug in the washer.  Yes, that's right, I plug in the washer outside of the bathroom.

Load the big cylinder up with laundry.  You get to join us for towels :)

Next I have to fill up the cylinder with water.  There are two tubes I am supposed to hook together and connect to the sink in the bathroom to fill up the cylinder with, but it's too difficult and leaks a lot, so I just take the "shatafa" (kinda like a water hose for the toilet), turn it on and rig it up so it will be filling while I walk around and do stuff around the house instead of standing there holding it the whole time.

Add some detergent, put the lid back on and set the cycle for anything up to 15 minutes.  I was doing everything for 15 minutes, but I am noticing it is really rough on our clothes, so I've been putting it on for less time.

When it's done (no beep or anything I just notice I don't hear it anymore) it looks like this, sometimes more sometimes less suds.

Now for the draining.  This is a hole in the floor of our bathroom.  We also have one in the kitchen.  It's actually quite nice when you're mopping.

So I have to take hose from the washer and put it to this hole.  The water comes out too fast/strong, so I have to kneel here the whole time it's draining and hold the hose to the hole so water doesn't get all over the bathroom floor.

Here's a good view of the gauges on the washer.  Once I drain the water, I basically repeat all the previous steps except for the detergent to rinse the clothes/towels.

Once I have rinsed and drained, I then move all the clothes over to the second cylinder.  If I do a full load on the left side, I will not be able to fit them all in on the right, so I'll have to take several turns to get them all done.

There's this weird lid thing I put on top of the spinner cylinder.  I guess it keeps the clothes from flying out?

Close all the lids and set it to spin for 5 minutes.

They look kinda like this when they're done.  All smashed up against the sides.

I drain everything again and set to hanging up the wet stuff to dry.  Here's our drying rack.  I did another load of laundry after this pic so I was saving room on the rack for more clothes to come.

For big towels and jeans, I hang them on Andrew's pull up bars :)

Since our new apartment is so cold and it's quite wet in the city right now, it takes several days for clothes to dry and can take up to a week for jeans and big towels.

Well, that's just a brief summary of how we get our clothes done :)  If you're ever doing some cleaning on a Wednesday, think about us, we're probably cleaning too!