Adapting to Ireland: Doing Laundry

I’m not sure that I’ve met anyone who actually likes to do laundry, myself included. But when it’s in your home or apartment, it’s not so bad, because at least you don’t have to lug it to a Laundromat or down to the bottom floor of your dorm building like you did in college, right? That’s what I thought too when I moved into an apartment on the ground floor, just a few steps away from the laundry machine. After the standard three weeks, it occurred to me that I desperately needed to do laundry and waiting until I go home to my parents’ house (in May) was out of the question.

When I moved in, my leasing agent told me that there was a washer and dryer in the shed in the courtyard (it seems to be quite common in Ireland to have a shed built in the backyard or courtyard of a building for the washer/dryer). Lovely. Yet when I first went to do laundry, I found only one unit: washer only.

Luckily, the morning that I got up bright and early at 8am, I was 15 minutes too late and one of the other tenants had beaten me to it. I say luckily, because had she not, I wouldn’t have had any idea how to operate the machine. She showed me how to go inside to the hallway, insert a 2 euro coin into a box under the cabinet, and turn the knob to turn on power/water to the machine. She also explained that we only get cold water to wash the clothes, so don’t bother setting it on anything other than 30 degrees Celsius.

No problem. What hadn’t occurred to me was that I had better start praying to the weather gods for no rain because without a drying machine, and without sufficient space in my room to put a drying rack even if I owned one, hanging my clothes on the line to dry was the only option. I’d never done this before. It’s really not common in the States – usually you either hang dry clothes in a laundry room or dry them in the machine.

After two hours and three loads of laundry, most of the clothes that I own were hanging in the courtyard on an incredibly windy day. It turns out, that’s great laundry weather so long as it doesn’t rain (luckily, it didn’t), and your clothes don’t blow away to Wales (they didn’t, though I was concerned). And so, my first laundry experience was a success.

(Note: my second was an epic failure due to torrential rain for days on end. Also, it turns out that my washer also functions as a dryer, but only in the sense that it has a spin cycle that you can run until you’re blue in the face and your clothes are damp instead of wet. I’m grateful that I don’t have to wash my clothes by hand, but I may need to find some friends with drying machines for the winter months when line drying may result in freezing my t-shirts solid.)