Laundry Adventures

Usually we don't use our blog to "air our dirty laundry" but I think this story of our adventures in doing laundry needs to be shared. It all started Monday night when following our usually laundry pattern we sorted and separated our clothes, picking out the brights because it was their turn in the rotation. We then put the laundry bucket in the shower, added the powder soap and "showered our laundry" since the water only comes out the shower head for some reason. Then we left our clothes to soak in the soapy water overnight. We awoke Tuesday morning and followed the usual routine of scubbing and ringing, soaking in rinse water and ringing, and finally rinsing in the wash sink and giving it a final ringing out. Then we hung them to dry on our back balcony. We went to work as usual on Tuesday morning and by afternoon it had started raining. It rained most of Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and was even starting to rain again when we reached home Wednesday evening. All this time our laundry had been hanging on our back balcony just hoping for the sun to come out and dry it. After checking the week's forecast and realizing thunderstorms were predicted for the whole island for the next 7 days we realized we were going to have to take a different course of action. We consulted with a few of our co-workers on what they do and set to work Wednesday evening. We snatched the clothes of the line as soon as we got home and returned them to the laundry bucket in the shower. Then we soaked them in water with fabric softener added so that we could rid them of the "raw" smell caused by the rain. (Fabric softener is our wonderful new discovery that we are going to start using every time we do laundry because even without the rain our clothes still smell a bit funny.) We gave them a good ringing out in the bathtub and then we tried ironing them dry. Theoretically this would work but we soon realized after spending 2 hours on 5 pairs of shorts that it would also take forever. So on to Plan 2. We strung up two laundry lines inside our house. If we had a hammer and some nails this would have been much easier but we just had to make do with what we had (door frames and curtain rods). We hung all the laundry back up on the indoor lines, opened all the windows and put a fan on them. When we awoke this morning everything was pretty dry except for the socks. So we went back to the ironing technique to try and get the socks closer to dry. We decided just to be cautious we would leave everything up on the lines inside with the windows open while we went to work today too. Hopefully, by the time we get home tonight they will be ready to put away. Then we can start the next load because this adventure has created quite a backlog. Hopefully this time it won't take 3 whole days!
-Kaelyn