Laundry Room

[nelsonic]

⚠️ WARNING: Contains "First World Problemz"

Please don't read this. You've been warned. 👌 I'm fully aware that having a dedicated room just for laundry is a problem very few people face... But if we're going to have 20+ people staying in this house then it's one we 100% need to resolve! This issue relates to the wider "Systems" Epic: #113

Context

At present we have 3 problems with laundry:

1. Location of machines creates noise & vibration for the "Studio" and house.
2. Zero Space for soaking, hand-washing, hanging (air-drying), ironing or storing clothes.
3. Occupying Space that could be much better used for something else

Let's review these issues in order.

1. Location

Our laundry room is adjoining the kitchen. That's great in terms of convenience. 👌 But horrible in terms of noise and vibration. 😖 We run at least one load of laundry per day (average) and often more and when the spin cycle is on it feels like we're in a hurricane! 🌀 The machine is often put on at night when the energy is cheapest and when the spin cycle kicks in it wakes me in my bed.

Note: Yes, I am what some would call a "light sleeper" ... always have been. But I feel like I am the "problem" ... 🤷‍♂️

We have tried to dampen the effects of the Washer & Drier vibration and noise using commercial vibration absorption pads. They offer some respite but not nearly enough.

2. No Space

Not having any space to prepare (soak, hand-wash), hang (for air-drying) or "process" (iron, sort & fold) laundry, means that all these activities spill over into the kitchen (soaking + hand-washing) or worse they occupy an entire room upstairs in the house ... 🤦‍♂️

The room currently being used is meant to be fore people to stay in. If we don't resolve the laundry issue (which will only get worse if there are more people in the house!), we are sacrificing a whole room of living space to laundry.

Perhaps a good way of thinking about this is in terms of Opportunity Cost: Extremely conservatively, a room with 3 bunk beds in a Hostel is €600/month revenue. So having the room even partially occupied with laundry services is sacrificing €7,200/year of revenue ... 💸 🔥

Note: Obvs feel free to plug your own numbers into this, but the outcome is the same; we need a better way of handling laundry. We could pay for a local laundry service to handle all our linen/towels etc. And the guests staying @home could also use the laundromat ... But does that sound like a better idea financially? If we were spending €7 per laundry load and still had to take it there and collect it ourselves, with 3 loads per day it's €21/day i.e. €630/month PLUS the time to deliver and collect ... ⏳

There are home-collection+delivery services but they charge per-item i.e. Footballer Money ... 💰 https://www.lav.com.pt/pt/lavar-e-engomar

It's far more financially and time-efficient for our house keeper to handle the laundry on-site in a dedicated area than to continue wasting the time and resources we are currently doing. Speaking of which ...

3. Space Adjoining the Kitchen

While we originally reserved the space next to the kitchen as the [micro] laundry room, The shelves have been used as an overflow storage room for many kitchen items. This makes the laundry room incredibly cluttered which is super lame.

If we want to have enough space for the people staying in the house to each have their own cupboard space, we need to free-up that space. And what better place to store the overflow kitchen items than right next to the kitchen?

Is there any alternative...? 💭

This got me thinking: is there somewhere else we could put the laundry machines? Specifically somewhere that isn't connected to the "main wall" of the house and therefore the vibration would not transmit through the house ... 💭

Which got me thinking about ideal Laundry Room design/layout & dimensions... 🤔

Axsked Google: "ideal laundry room size" https://www.google.com/search?q=ideal+laundry+room+size

The top result and snippet is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2018/02/06/what-to-think-about-before-building-a-home-laundry-room/

"the minimum size for one of these [laundry] rooms
should be 9 feet wide by 11 feet long. Bigger is better."

2.7m x 3.4m

What if we could build an ideal laundry room from scratch? One that would include space for air-drying clothes.

This site has a good list of layouts: https://www.dimensions.com/collection/laundry-room-layouts

I'm opening this issue because I believe there is a good alternative. One that uses considerably less electricity for Dehumidifiers to dry clothes and resolves all the vibration issues.

If you've read this far and are curious what I have in mind. Drop a comment.

[iteles]

I know what you have in mind. Will be interesting to hear more.

[nelsonic]

Let's say that we have 21 people in the house and that bed linen and towels are washed for each bed once per week. And that each machine load fits the towels and linen for 3 beds. That's 1 load per day. Then if each person does 1 load of personal laundry per week it's another 3 loads per day. i.e. 4 washing loads per day. If the average wash time is 3 hours it's 12 hours of continuous use per day. (yes, there are faster cycles on the washing machine! but the "eco" mode is slower ...)

If we operate with this as our baseline we need "enough" space to hang this much laundry (if we aren't using the dryer).

[nelsonic]

"I know what you have in mind."

@iteles what is that...? 💭