I Didn’t Mean To Fix the Laundry Room

Honest, officer, I didn’t mean to fix the laundry room. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a laundry room. Well, I do have a laundry room, but your honor, I didn’t have a laundry room. No one saw me fix the laundry room, no one can prove I fixed the laundry room, so there’s no reason to accuse me of fixing the laundry room. By the way, do you want to see pictures of the laundry room?

Well, someone voted for it, back when I was asking commenters for advice. Someone pleasant, as I recall. So since we’re all thoroughly up to date and bored with our dining room, I have to write about something. Why not the laundry room?

I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t mean to fix, er, build a laundry room. It was collateral damage from the master bathroom remodel. Our washer and dryer were in our (unrenovated) bathroom, and they needed a new home before we could remodel the joint.

I was laboring under the misapprehension that my wife liked having the laundry in the bathroom off our bedroom, near the kitchen. Boy howdy, was I wrong. I figured that a basement laundry room added a whole ‘nother level (sorry) of effort to doing the laundry. Carrying laundry up and down the stairs must suck, right? Having the laundry on the floor where more than half of it gets dirty must be a convenience, amiright?

Wrong. Mrs. Cottage made me listen to the laundry once, to straighten me out. She spent her whole day listening to stuff like this:

That’s just one cycle of the washer. It does everything but play Tubular Bells and make your head spin around on the other cycles. And the dryer squeaks. I’ve fixed it about a dozen times, but it still squeaks. I think they installed the squeak at the factory, and I hesitate to tinker with original equipment manufacturer parts, so I let it squeak now. Anyway, when they both get rocking, it was like installing a bowling alley in my poor wife’s head.

So we decided that the master bathroom remodel would make a great wintertime project. But construction triage meant I’d have to get the washer and dryer out the front door, down the driveway, up onto the side porch, and into the basement before the snow began in earnest. I rushed to plumb a new spot in the basement for the pair to land, and my spare heir and I muscled them into the basement. Just in time, too. It snowed the next day, and that was the end of the driveway down to the back of the house for the rest of the season. Pheww.

Why wouldn’t we just bring the appliances down the stairs to the basement, instead of going the long way around the barn? Here are the stairs, that’s why:

Yeah, death stairs. They’re winders, and the landing at the bottom looked like this:

That’s a boarded up window on the left, under the plastic sheet. The builders of the house put a window at the bottom of these stairs, because they were smart. Some former residents boarded it up, because they were something else. At any rate, it was close enough to a physical impossibility to get the big, white appliances down the stairs without losing an heir or a laundress or my patience, so we went around. But I can’t let the laundress carry baskets of clothes up and down those stairs, can I? Not if I like her. I do.

[To be continued]