How to launder, UK-style

File under Things To Know About Living in the UK:

In order to do your laundry at home, not in My Beautiful Launderette with Daniel Day Lewis, find the washing machine in your kitchen. It will be disguised behind a cabinet door.

• At the end of every day, sort all your dirty laundry by the type of fabric weight AND the type of wash it requires (regular/permanent press/knits/delicates).
• Place seven or eight (7 or 8) garments OR two (2) sheets OR four (4) towels into the front-loading combination washer/dryer.
• Choose your wash temperature from the options listed only in centigrade, from 40 to 90 C.
• Choose a number from 1 to 9 that will determine the length and amount of washing, and type of drying. Note that these things are not independent of each other.
• Figure out where the laundry detergent goes. Use about two tablespoons, as this is the size of the jug's cap, and you don't have that much laundry in there anyway.
• Choose your drying level. You can have 40, 60, 100, or 150 minutes.
• Alternatively, you can choose one of three picture icons for your drying cycle. These include a shirt with the sun shining on it, a shirt going out a door, or an ironing board.
• Choose one of two settings on four additional push-buttons: one has an iron with an X through it, one says 1200 over 600, one has an icon with a shirt dipping into a puddle, and one is on/off.
• Once you have made all your choices and added the liquid detergent, push ON and close the cabinet door. This locks the machine so that no last-minute item of that wash/dry type can be added, meaning it could be a week before you get to that wash/dry combination again.

• Wait approximately four hours. The machine is purported to wash AND dry your load in approximately this amount of time.
• While you are waiting, wonder several times why it takes so long. Also, listen to the dry cycle's whirring sound that makes it seem like an aircraft is revving its jet engines in your kitchen.
• If your bedroom is next to the kitchen, learn that you may not want to start a load before you go to bed.
• If you are a person who cannot leave the home while the dryer is running due to a prior experience with a dryer fire where you and Essie carried the flaming machine out the basement bulkhead door, (as a beloved family member did many years ago) then you will never be able to leave the flat.
• When the machine finally unlocks, find your still damp laundry inside. You then have several choices. Set the dryer timer to an additional number of minutes (100 recommended) and override the wash settings so the machine just dries. Do this several more times.

• Attend a Welcome New Parents Coffee at your child's school, where one of the parents has humorous vignettes about living in the UK as part of her welcome talk. Learn that there is a little tray of water at the bottom of the machine that has to be emptied out after every load, or else more water will not be able to be spun out of your laundry during the pre-dry spin cycle and garments will remain damp ad nauseum.
• Attempt to find the little tray at the bottom of the machine, which is blocked off by cabinetry. Discover the little tray of water RIGHT THERE next to the slot where the liquid detergent is added, and marvel that you never noticed that it was full of water before.
• After several weeks, discover the instructions for the washing machine in the back of the hall closet.
• Finally decode the icons: The drying icons are said to be "based on the damp level of the dry clothes", which I guess means how damp you want your clothes to be when they come out of the dryer, not a concept with which I am familiar. My US dryer would sense how damp the load was and keep running until it was dry. The ironing board icon means your clothes will come out slightly damp so they will be easier to iron; the shirt-going-out-a-door icon is called "wardrobe", and is the setting to use if you want your clothes dry enough to put away; and the shirt with the sun on it is NOT the one to use if you are going to dry your clothes on a line in the sun, but IS to be used to get "very dry clothes, recommended for towelling and bathrobes". Grammar note: I think that "towelling" is a verb, e.g. an action that you do with a towel (noun) to dry off something. "She used chose a warm, fluffy towel for towelling off the dog before he could drip all over the house."
• Discover that the four buttons that toggle on/off control an "easy iron" function, allowing "your washing to come out of the machine without creases, making it much easier to iron. You can use it with programmes 3-4 (cotton), 5-6-7 (synthetics) and 9-10 (delicates).. Press this button in programmes 5-6-7-8-9 and the wash cycle will come to a stop on the icon showing a tub of water (not sure if this is soak, or rinse). You can complete it by pressing the "easy iron" button again. Notes--"this function should not be used when button G "stain removal" has been pressed--If you also want to run the drying cycle, this button is enabled only if combined with level "iron icon". " Got that?
• Learn that the 1200 over 600 icon is the "slow spin" button. "Use this button to reduce the spinning speed from 1200 to 600 rpm for the cotton and linen programmes and from 850 to 600 rpm for the synthetic fabric programmes." Oh, okay!
• The third icon button of a shirt dipping into a puddle means "stain removal". The instruction book informs me that "thanks to this command, the washer-dryer will carry out a more intensive wash that optimises the effectiveness of the liquid additives, thus allowing more resistant stains to be removed. When you press the stain removal button, you cannot activate the pre-wash." DUH! and Thanks to this command!
• Finally, the 0= out, 1=in button indicates that it is an on/off switch, as previously suspected. I am again informed by the instructions in bold that "Turning the appliance off does not cancel the selected programme." !!!!?????
• Now that I know to empty the little puddle of water out of the machine before each use, each load "only" takes between three and four hours.

• Repeat this process twice a day (thereby cleaning up to 15 garments per day). If you forget to do two loads a day, you will have more dirty laundry to process than is humanly possible.
• Find an ex-pat Canadian who is moving back home on Gumtree.com, the UK's version of Craig's list. Arrange to buy his three (3) laundry drying racks, so that you can install one in the bath tub (it does not contain the shower and is never used) and one for each bedroom. This will mean you can choose less than 100 minutes drying time and perhaps compress more loads into your waking hours.
• Learn that a new friend had the foresight to talk her landlord into installing an additional dryer in a utility closet in the hall before she moved in. Remember the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's dryer.
• Launder. Rinse. Dry. Repeat