La-La-La-Laundry!

When Dave and I moved to Pahrump, we were feeling pretty good about all of the grown-up things that we'd already done.  He had his first full-time job.  I was done with all of my Master's classes.  We were renting our own place and paying for utilities.  We owned a piano and our own bed.  So, yeah, we were feeling like adults.

But, through an unfortunate experience, we've taken one more step recently to become even more adult-like.

Here's the sich: Here in Pahrump, we found two different laundomats.  We planned to use laundromats for a while and save up money for a washer and dryer at some point in the distant future.  And actually, we only used the laundromat for washing, anyway, since the air outside is so warm that it seemed silly to pay for a dryer to do what the air would do!  We hung our clothes on the fence in our backyard.  So we figured that this would be a good way to save money.  Yay!

Here's a picture of the laundromat that we used.  Yes, use-d, in the past tense.

It turns out that even though this is the nice-looking, clean laundromat with plenty of machines, the service here is terrible.  In the next few paragraphs, I'm going to give the story.  If you don't care to hear a lot of whining and complaining (and the story of some real abuse!), then just know that we decided never to go there again and skip down to the next picture.

There was one evening that Dave and I decided to pop in and do some laundry.  It was probably 7:02pm.  When we approached the door of the laundromat, a woman told us that they closed at 7pm.  This surprised us because the sign on the door said that they were open until 9pm.  When we asked about that, they said that the last customer is let in at 7pm so that they would be done with washing and drying by 9pm.

This seemed pretty reasonable.  But we explained that we only wanted to use the washer, since we would dry our clothes at home, and asked if they would make an exception for us.  The woman reluctantly allowed us in.  She said that we needed to have our laundry done by the time they closed.  We thought "No problem" since it takes about 20 minutes to do a load and we could put all of our loads in at the same time.

Dave and I put in the laundry to wash, Dave sat down to wait for the laundry to be done, and I got in the car to go to the grocery store, since we needed to do our grocery shopping that night too.  When I left, the harassment started.  The woman asked Dave where I had gone and he told her that I was going grocery shopping.  She was mad because she thought that I would take a long time at the store and that that would keep us in the laundromat late.  Dave was confused by this because he knew that we would definitely be out of there before it closed at 9pm, and he said so.  She responded by saying that they were closing at 8pm.  Apparently, when there are no customers there after 8pm, she closes early (because they don't let any new customers in after 7pm) and she doesn't get paid for that last hour of work.  Of course she overlooked the fact that Dave WAS a customer and that if he happened to stay later, he would in fact still have a right to be there.  But he only had to wait for the loads of laundry to be done, so he again said that he would be out of there before 8pm.

At this point she had been rude enough.  The only thing that I can think of to explain her behavior is that she didn't want to wait until even a little past 8pm, since she wouldn't get paid for that hour.  But she was so rude about it.  Then she walked by our machines and made loud exclamations.  Apparently, we hadn't closed one of our machines all of the way, and so it hadn't started when the other one did.  It would take another 20 minutes to finish its load.  The woman swore and was making a big deal out of it, even though it was still more than 20 minutes before 8pm.

Needless to say, when I showed up at the laundromat again, Dave was fuming.  We waited just a few more minutes and got our laundry out and into the car.  We were driving away at least 5 minutes before 8pm, and we knew that we would never come back.

Fortunately, when we decided on a place to rent, we chose one that had hook-ups for a washer and dryer, even though we weren't planning on buying them for a while.

That Saturday we went to the Home Depot and bought a washer (still no dryer because of the reasons mentioned above).  We had to wait about a week and a half for it to be delivered, because we bought it over Labor Day weekend and the Home Depot had a lot of deliveries to make.  Here is a picture of it running its first wash!

And here are some videos demonstrating some of its awesome features!  (Can you tell that we are so proud of our new baby?)

For those of you curious about our drying procedure, here are pictures of the fence drying method.  The one bad thing about this method is that the clothes start out like this:

And end up like this:

It is really windy here in Pahrump.  So that kind of creates a problem in keeping the clothes clean when they are drying.  To take care of that, Dave installed these handy-dandy clotheslines in our garage.  The garage gets almost as warm as it does outside, so the clothes still dry pretty fast.

We are also getting a lot of things from my parents as they are cleaning out their house in preparation for this mission, either to keep or to babysit for two years.  So we also have a dryer on its way that we are going to babysit for my parents while they are gone.  So when it's cold in the winter (or when we have clothes we want dry in a hurry) we may use that to dry our clothes instead.