Every Day is Laundry Day

There are a lot of great things about living in Germany - the people, the shopping, the little town squares and the proximity to other really cool European places.  It's also really great that Germans are very energy conscious, although it makes me feel both guilty and defiant when I can't find regular light bulbs at the store and am forced to either buy really expensive energy efficient ones or sit in the dark (side note: I recently learned that old-fashioned energy-wasting bulbs aren't sold in Germany anymore). But two things I really miss about our old place in America are our giant energy-guzzling washer and dryer appliances.

Back in America, we used to save up our laundry and do it all in one day.  Because the machines were large and fast, it was possible to wash, dry and fold 4 loads of laundry in a day, no problem. (Don't ask about the 4th step - putting the clean clothes away.  We're guilty of just grabbing clean clothes out of the basket until we're forced to officially empty the basket in order to refill it with more dirty clothes later in the week.)

But here, every day is laundry day for four reasons. 

1. Our washing machine holds half the amount of clothes as our machine in America.  This means 4 loads per week becomes 8, which is too many for only 1 laundry day per week.
2. Our washing machine is slow.  I believe our clothes get a better wash in this machine ... but it takes 1.5 hours for it to complete 1 wash cycle.  
3. We don't have a dryer. This is the real kicker to having to do laundry every day.  Dryers are not very common here because they use up so much energy.  Much more common are drying racks, which we have 2.  Our drying racks are located in our loft area (aka: guest room / laundry room) and each rack can hold 1 to 1.5 loads of laundry.  During the spring/summer a load can usually dry in a day because the loft gets god sunlight and it's really hot up there, but in the winter it sometimes would take 48 hours for clothes to dry due to no sunlight and it being so cold.
4. The washing machine is in the basement.  This reason just boils down in part to (my) laziness.  I don't want to have to walk up and down three flights of stairs to get one load of laundry, then go up a fourth flight of stairs to the loft to hang everything up. Pure and simple laziness.

So, there you have it folks.  Probably the most boring and mundane blog post yet.  Please don't let this deter you from coming back.  I promise, more interesting posts are on their way. 

Boring photo to go with our boring blog post. These are our two drying racks in the loft.