#446 - Just Say NO to Laundrymats!

We've moved to the country and are living in an RV over the next year as we prep the land and build our cabin. So, we're still living in between, for a while. The process to building our country home will be extensive.

In the past couple of weeks, we've gone from living in a large home with three bathrooms to living in an RV with two slide-outs and one very UN-private bathroom, unless you close both doors on each side of bathroom, which we rarely have energy to do.

The RV bathroom doors work great for visiting company, but for the two of us, the pocket doors stay pocketed in their place.

We decided, these are the times when it serves us well to have been married for over 26 years.

The master bathroom in the house was very large. We had a separate shower, two-person garden tub with seat, separate potty room, two sinks, a large vanity AND a large bathroom-pantry closet in addition to our massive master closet that was large enough to have a ceiling fan. My daughter's boyfriend, Brice, cracked me up as he said it was "ridiculous" to have a closet so big that it requires a ceiling fan, but I counter with that humor as I say...ANYTHING in the South serves us better with a ceiling fan.

Finding an RV that works for a man well over six foot tall is, in itself, a tall order. Since I am barely over five foot tall, we don't have a problem on my end, but the man requires headroom. Most RV showers found him standing with the top of his head inside the sun-dome and me laughing, except when it was getting too close to us selling our house and then I was closer to crying.

The RV we purchased is designed for tall people. It has a domed ceiling that adds a few inches of headroom, which is beautiful and the shower gives ample room for Sgt. Dave to TRY to rinse off the caked on dirt that he accumulates while working his land.

Therefore, he often takes showers at the outside shower area that came with the RV. Thank God for hot and cold outdoor water!

We needed to make space for our bodies in this space, so we purchased two separate dispensers to hold shampoo, conditioner, body soap and more shampoo. I installed these with the stickies and adhesive that could put you on the floor gasping for air. And Sgt. Dave installed a much better shower head that has the water-stoppage nozzle to control water usage.

This week, after my horrible experience at a laundrymat/washeteria, I've been hand-washing a few things. As for being without a washer and drying, I've served years of duty in a washeteria throughout my years, but it's been a LONG time since we've used one. This past week, the one outside of town we found was HOT and MISERABLE and WITHOUT any where to sit.

Sgt. Dave had helped me get all the clothes into the washers, then he headed out in a mad dash to drop things off at the storage facility on the other side of town while I waited for our washing machines to finish so I could move our laundry from the washing machines to the driers.

We had gone out to eat earlier, so I was wearing a nice dress that I had recently purchased in Houston.

All our dirty laundry took up FIVE industrial washing machines. The country sure is a dirty place to live!

I got over-heated and there were crates on the sidewalk outside of the washing facility, but I felt rather out of place in my city dress to be sitting on a crate. There was also a bench, but it had slats missing and I didn't relish the feel of my rear falling through the gaping hole. So, I stood on the sidewalk, with all my LONG curly hair becoming heavier by the second and making me more over-heated as I tried to avoid the blaring sun while keeping an eye on my laundry supplies inside the washeteria.

And $4.00 per load is NOT cheap!

Good thing is...I understand a fair bit of Spanish, so I was a tad distracted by the soap opera playing on the television inside the hot-hell-hole that had two ceiling fans, but only one was puttering.

Then, as I stood outside, on the sidewalk...over a period of about twenty minutes, I had two rather nice gentlemen come up to me as I stood trying to gasp fresh air and ask me if I were ok, if I needed anything.

Of course, that mortified me.

They stared at me with perplexed expressions...as though I were lost and out of my mind to be standing there at the washeteria attached to the local gas station off the freeway.

What?

What did it look like I was doing?