I have to admit, I am a HUGE laundry nerd. But believe it or not, the last 3.5 years of my life were spent without access to a washer/dryer! Our condo did not have them set up, so we took the easy way out and used a wash and fold service for 3.5 years. While the people at the laundromat were incredibly nice and did a lovely job of folding clothes neatly, I absolutely hated the whole experience. Here’s why:
- No control over which laundry products and wash cycles are being used
- No control over sorting (I always sorted our stuff into three bags: whites, colors, darks, but who knows if they actually kept them separated)
- Having to “ration” sheets and towels according to the monthly laundry drop off schedule
- At least once a month we would find a lonely strange sock in our load…
- No way to easily do delicates, other than hand washing in the sink
- Constant “laundry crises”, where we would suddenly realize we are completely out of work shirts or pants, and the inevitable 3-day delay from that moment to when we would finally get our load back
- And of course the horror of having to drag 40+ pounds of dirty clothes to the closest laundromat
So when the topic of wedding gifts came up, I told my then husband-to-be that I wanted only one thing: a washer and dryer. And to reward me for all the years of not being able to do my own laundry, we decided to go with a Miele set: the Miele W3038 Washer
and T8023C Dryer
.
We completely redid the laundry closet in the bathroom, which used to house all the household stuff, put in Elfa shelving, including the BRILLIANT Elfa Door Rack System, and finally had the stacked set installed.
And then the fun began! It’s probably a little strange that I get as excited about laundry as I do, but I’ve pretty much been washing non-stop the last two months. I’ve tried out a bunch of different laundry detergents (I almost need an intervention based on the amount of boxes and bottles I now have…), additives and cleaning cycles, and now feel like I can share my experience! So I’ve started working on a fairly large blog post comparing all sorts of detergents – from regular Tide
to pricey The Laundress
and Persil Megaperls
to “green” options like Vaska, Method
and Caldrea. Stay tuned!
Update: you can now read the first part of my laundry detergent review here (Tide vs German Persil), and also check out my quick initial review of US Persil ProClean here.
In the meantime, a picture showing the miracles a good washer and detergent can do: these are two pillowcases from a set that we had been using for years. I was about to throw them out, but decided to see what a soak in some sodium percarbonate and hot water wash with Persil Megaperls Universal can do…
These are two pillowcases from the same set: the one on the left after three years of being washed at the laundromat, the one on the right after a soak and wash in the Miele
