Hung out to dry

We're talking laundry today, not MEO (Our 100th post. We're surprised too.)

We used to think nothing of washing clothes. We’d toss whatever needed cleaning down the laundry chute to the basement¹ where it would sit unobtrusively out of the way until it was time to drop it into our spacious, top-loading washing machine. Which we did once a week. Then, maybe 45 minutes or so later, we’d transfer the load to our spacious² dryer and after another hour, our clothes would be done.

Get dirt on our blanket? Take it down to the basement and wash it.

Josie decided to vomit on the throw rug?³ Down to the basement and wash it.

Those, my friends, were the days.

Laundry in Lisbon has been an adventure.

Our apartment at Rua do Salitre had a washing machine. Yay!

Before we could use the machine, though, we needed detergent. Turns out, it’s quite difficult to find perfume-free cleaning products in Portugal. Even something as benign as cleaning vinegar - Yes, we said Cleaning Vinegar - is often equipped with a lemon scent. Because artificial perfumes aggravate Amy’s asthma, we spent a lot of time reading labels. In Portuguese.⁴ Finally, we located a bottle of … something that didn’t have an added scent. Yay!

Now we could tackle The Machine. It, of course, was in the kitchen.⁵ It was also a front loader - it had to be given that it was under the counter. At first, we didn’t think a front loader would matter all that much. Until we realized we hadn’t tossed a dish towel in a load. Nope. Sorry. Once you’ve got water in there, that door ain’t openin’ until the wash cycle is done. The dish towel waited another week for its cleaning.

The washing machine was also small. (It had to be given that it was tucked under the kitchen counter.) The dials were labeled in Portuguese, of course. There was no manual. The manuals we could find online were in Portuguese and Spanish. The symbols and dial options were not what we were used to seeing, either. And, for reasons we do not understand, it took more than three hours to run a standard load of laundry. (And by “standard,” we mean “small.”)

The apartment also had a clothesline. That was charming. We even used it. After Scott leaned precariously out of the window with a can of WD-40 to silence the shrieking wheels that alerted the entire neighborhood whenever we had a wash day.

It’s a long way down.

Clotheslines that are more than a story above the ground are just askin’ for trouble. Our downstairs neighbor was kind enough to return the odd dish towel or sock we would drop every now and then.⁶

We had exactly two conversations with Lucy. The first was through her cracked open front door a few days after we moved in. The second was on the sidewalk outside the building about a week before we moved out. But she always returned our laundry.

After a couple of weeks, we had our first laundry-related breakthrough when our next door neighbor, a lovely young Russian woman who was moving out because her landlord refused to renew her long-term lease,⁷ told us there was a washer and dryer (!) in the basement of the building!⁸

Not only did she alert us to their existence, she taught us how to use our apartment key to help open the drawer to retrieve the tokens needed to run them.⁹ And she showed us how to push the token slot in at a funny angle when you press the start button or else nothing happens. While these were still front loading models, they had a larger capacity than our kitchen machine.

It was less fun to carry the clothes down three flights of stairs (or on the elevator) than it was to toss them into the laundry chute, but it was a definite improvement over the previous scenario.

The second laundry breakthrough occurred on December 3 when we went to the Liberty Store. Located in the Saldanha neighborhood, the Liberty Store essentially buys massive amounts of American products, pays exorbitant costs to ship them to Portugal, and charges its customers, presumably, enough to make a profit.

It ain’t cheap.

And we were darn happy to spend 143€ there on our first visit. Exactly 35,99€ of that was on a giant bottle of All Free and Clear laundry detergent. It felt expensive but framing it as “this should last us a year” made the pill a little less bitter.

One of the best purchases we’ve made since we arrived. 10/10 will buy it again.

For many months, we had a stable laundry situation. We were quite pleased.

Then we decided to buy an apartment.

The apartment came with a built-in washing machine. In the kitchen, natch. Which, yes, means it’s both front-loading and wee.¹⁰ Since it’s smaller than the one at the previous pad, we made sure to wash our blankets, throw rugs, and other large items right before we moved. They simply won’t fit in our new machine.

We found a manual for the appliance in the apartment after we moved in. We’ve even managed to download a copy in English! Of course, manuals can be confusing even when you’re able to read them.

Our washing machine can hold 8 kg of clothes, it says. Unless we want to wash those clothes in “only” 90 minutes,¹¹ in which case the capacity mysteriously drops to 4 kg.

Which is fine. Four kilograms is almost 9 pounds of clothes. After we separate out whites from colors we’re usually under 4 kg per load.

Only. Is that 4 kg of dry clothes or 4 kg of wet clothes? And if it’s wet clothes, is that “end of the cycle when all of the excess water has been spun out of them” wet or “middle of the cycle when they are at their heaviest” wet? The manual doesn’t specify. Because one is impossible to weigh and the other is difficult to predict, we’re going with dry clothes.¹²

Fine.

Now, can anyone explain the bleach situation? Here’s what the manual says on page 25:

Bleach goes into compartment II. As does the detergent. Do we put them in at the same time?

But wait, there’s more.

The word “bleach” appears a total of four times in the manual. The first is on page 25, above.

Here’s what page 35 has to say about bleach:

So put your bleach into compartment II. Either before, at the same time as, or after you put your laundry detergent there. And, oh, yeah, um, maybe don’t use bleach at all.

There’s also no clothes dryer in our apartment. Which, ok, we did the clothesline thing for a while, we can do it again. Problem is, there’s some sort of historic district regulation that prohibits clotheslines in our neighborhood. Or at least that’s what the promoter¹³ told us when we asked about installing a clothesline before we bought the place. Although there are plenty of nearby buildings that have clotheslines, so that smells a tad ratty.

There must be someone who can give permission to run a clothesline on our building. We’re not sure who that is or how to find them.¹⁴ And, honestly, we’re not sure we even want to go back to clotheslines if we can a) surmount the permission obstacle and b) find someone to actually install one.

Our experience has been that air-dried clothes come out scratchier than ones we’ve machine dried. This may be partially (wholly?) because we don’t use fabric softener. Regardless, the towels in particular benefit from being tumble dried.

We know there are machines that both wash and dry clothes. We used one of them a few years ago on a vacation to England. It took 7 or 8 hours to do one load of laundry. We believe our neighbors two flights up have purchased one of these beasts. We will need to ask many questions of them.

The neighbor directly above us¹⁵ uses an indoor clothes rack to dry her clothes. That’s an option. It takes up a lot of space in what is not a giant place to begin with, and we haven’t seen one that we’re confident would hold an entire load of clothes, much less two loads at a time.

For now, we’re using the laundromat. A mere 140 meters away, it’s not all that much farther than a trip to the basement.

It’s usually empty. Scott has only had to wait a few minutes once or twice to get a dryer.

The driers are large and they dry a full load in 18 minutes. We do two loads of wash in the apartment, tote them around the corner, pay 3,40€ (includes a small discount for using a lavandaria card) and - assuming nobody else using either of the two dryers - are back em casa in under half an hour. Easy peasy.

During the rainy season? We’ll see.¹⁶

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott & Amy

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1. What? You’ve never had a laundry chute? We’re sorry to hear that. But you’re probably better off that way. We think this may be exception that proves the rule “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” We really miss our laundry chute.

2. Note the repeated use of the word “spacious.” That right there is a literary technique known as foreshadowing. We’d like to thank our high school English teachers …

3. Acorns. Too many acorns. And why does the vomit always happen at 2 AM?

4. Fortunately, perfume is pretty self-explanatory; as soon as we’d come across that word, or a variant - parfum, perfum … - we’d move on.

5. Where else could it go in 600 square feet/56 square meters?

6. Lucy, we don’t think you’re reading this but if you are, thank you. And we’re sorry.

7. That apartment remained empty for the duration of our stay.

8. Really?! And this wasn’t in the listing about the apartment why? That’s sort of a big deal. Can add to the value of an apartment.

9. Yes, the machines were even free to use!

10. And takes up valuable under-cabinet storage space.

11. As opposed to the standard setting, which takes three hours.

12. Seriously, though, if this is meant as some sort of warning about the ability of the machine to handle the weight, we don’t want to break it.

13. Promoter? Are we having a circus? Or a band? Apparently this is the translation for builder.

14. We’re open to suggestions if you’ve got any.

15. Talk about lucking out on neighbors: she’s incredibly sweet and her primary residence is in Scotland so she’s rarely actually above us. The only thing better than a good upstairs neighbor is an absent one.

16. A clothesline isn’t a particularly good option when it’s raining buckets either.