I never really had to worry about laundry growing up as a kid. My mom always did it. That's probably why I didn't have to worry about it. Until I got in to High School and sports and stuff and I had more laundry than the average kid. And my laundry was nasty. But there was one way to do it, warm, with soap, and then dry (sometimes if I got behind I would just wear a semi-wet T-shirt to school until it air dried).
Then I got married, and I was introduced to girl clothes. My clothes were made of one of two materials, cotton, or denim. Made life simple. Girl clothes are made of everything, silk, paisley (I don't know what that really is, just heard it somewhere), weird meshy stuff, bra material, spandex, pre-shrunk stuff, wool, egyptian cotton (what's wrong with our cotton?), and that other expensive wool crap, oh and leather. I'm probably forgetting several, or a lot, but it's like the shoes my wife has, they are varied.
So I have done laundry before, let me just get that out of the way, so this isn't a story of me not knowing how to start a washing machine and stuff. Instead this is me slowly destroying my wife's wardrobe. It's not really malicious (although some things were taken out intentionally) but most of them were either lost, or completely ruined on my part.
First Victim: Lace outer shirt. Did you know you aren't supposed to put these in the dryer? Apparently they melt.
Second Victim: Skirts- All of my wife's floor length skirts are pretty much knee length skirts right now. It said pre-shrunk, apparently they missed this one.... and that one...... well all of them.
Third victim: Anything with straps. You know the dryer spins right? Better make sure you put those straps in so they aren't stuck in the door when you shut it.
That's enough with the victims, it's story time. So before we moved to student housing, we had a washer and dryer (man we were livin' then) and it was normal to put in a load before going to bed and wake up the next day and pop it in the dryer. Usually I did this under my wife's supervision. Since moving here I have learned a thing or two about our laundry facility.
First is that you can't do all of your laundry in two machines. If you attempt this all you get is a washing machine that almost shakes itself off the pedestal, and soapy, sopping wet laundry that isn't clean. I actually found a core of dry laundry in the center of one of these laundry balls. I inevitably had to expand from two machines to eight (such a waste).
Second, you need to put the towels in a separate dryer, and add on at least two extra cycles. You also need to get your crap out and moved over or else someone will move your laundry out for you so they can have your machine (especially on Monday). For some strange reason, everyone does laundry on Monday. I learned this the hard way because after attempting to dry everything together on one cycle, at night, and then coming back the morning of, all my laundry smelled like Lukas's feet, and I had to start the whole process over again. Not really very fun.
So to sum up, I suck at laundry, and my wife has fewer clothes because of it. My clothes are fine because my wardrobe is made up of old race T-shirts, shorts, and other things made of cotton that have been washed so many times, pre-shrunk doesn't even begin to describe it. Spread out your wash, even to the point where you might have a T-shirt and a pair of jeans in one washer, or else the evil washer will start acting like the government and demand you give it more for less of what you were getting before (sorry I'm watching CNN while typing this).
