Day 14, Project Five: I Am The Walrus

You know what they say about the weather in New England. If you don’t like it, wait a week and a half and go bonkers waiting for a chance to go outside with your door!!!!!!!

Okay, my head has spun back round and is facing front again. Pea soup’s all cleaned up. What was I talking about?

Oh right. The laundry room.

Now, okay. The tiny closet where you wash your clothes is not the most interesting room in the house (I hope it isn’t, anyway, for all our sakes) but trust me, mine’s got game. I could write an entire book -- okay, maybe just a chapter -- about the travails of this particular cubby-full-’o’-white-goods, and still you wouldn’t have the entire story. Mostly because it isn’t finished yet. But with any luck (jump back, kiss yourself!), by the end of Puritan Manifesto Month (which is also National Candy Month, I just found out -- Friday’s Fudge Day!), it will be .

Now where was I?

Oh, right, the old-house thing. See, we’re mostly trying to stay true to the 1914 Craftsman style of this heap of wood we’re living in. (What other excuse could there be to spend two years stripping woodwork, I ask you?) But we get a pass on the back part of the house, which wasn’t built until like nineteen-fifty-half-ass and decorated in the style of sacrificial rot. If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year…

We gutted it and started over. Which is where the laundry room comes in.

(You see? You think I’m rambling, but eventually, like a Jehovah’s Witness, I come back around…)

We built the laundry room in a corner of what used to be the mushroom forest, and we bought brand-new stackable machines to put in there. (Actually, my mother bought them for us. Thanks Mom! Sorry about that whole Mommy-Dearest, cabana-boy thing I posted yesterday. Love you!). But when the machines (machine? It’s just one piece but two contraptions. Let’s just say “washer/dryer”) when the washer/dryer was (were?) delivered, I had the nice man set them up in the middle of the laundry room -- actually, practically outside the door -- because the baseboards weren’t installed yet.

Frankly, I didn’t give a holy hoo whether there were baseboards in the laundry room, but Johnny and his carpenter friend (who was helping put the baseboards in) agreed that “people like baseboards” and so we might as well. Now, forget for a minute the agricultural quantities of marijuana this king of a carpenter could send up in smoke on any given evening. He was right: we might as well -- if well we might. But, well, we didn’t.

And so there the washer/dryer sat, in the middle of the doorway, precluding us from actually putting up the door for eighteen months. The Whirlpool was my oyster. And I wept for it

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, when the sun refused to shine and I could do nothing on Puritan Project Number Freaking Three, I put my shoulder to the washer/dryer and I gave it a shove.

Whoops! It might have been a good idea to wait until the wash was finished first. And maybe not shove from the shoulder on stackable machines. But eventually I figured out how best to move it and, inch by inch, I slid it back against the wall.

Yuck! Have you ever seen the floor under your washer/dryer? Yeah, well, mine’s only been there for a year and a half, so I bet yours is freakin’ foul!

I vacuumed up the yuck that was loose and I mopped up the crap that was stuck, and that’s what I did yesterday. Period. Shoulder, hip, foot, shimmy, vacuum, mop. That’s it.

(Okay that’s not it. I also got a bunch of stuff ready so I could bleach the door this morning before I left for work. But the weather -- sheesh. Everybody always talks about this crap, why doesn’t anybody ever do anything about it?)

Day 14: Accomplished. (Yes, it was. That’s what I did and it counts, damnit. My rules, remember?)
Time: 20 minutes.
Cost: Three shreds of dignity.
The Crap That’s On The Floor Under Your Washer/Dryer: Putrid