It’s Always Laundry Day
Babies come out of the box in full chaos monkey mode, exposing your household infrastructure to frequent failures, which means you should ensure the services you rely upon are resilient.
One such critical service whose fragility you may not have anticipated is laundry. Can your household infrastructure handle washing a load of laundry every other day?
Your internal voice may be screaming, resisting this capacity planning forecast, but if you trusted your internal voice that much, why are you reading advice from a random stranger on the internet about topics related to the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life? Right.
You are going to want to wash the things that touch your baby. All the things. And oh my god are there so many things. Things you’ve thought of, but mostly things you haven’t. Swaddles and other clothing things (obviously), but also all the various mats, pads, and other soft things you will physically set your baby onto. Not to mention additional cleaning things like washcloths and wipes, which by virtue of making your baby cleaner, will make themselves dirtier. Everything needs to be washed, and often.
Plus, your old mental paradigm of, “I’ll pile up a bunch of dirty clothes and batch process them efficiently” is broken. First, you are not going to want to let poop, pee, and vomit linger on clothes for a week before you “get around to it”. Second, even if you thought this approach was acceptable (and OMG it is not), it’s unlikely your baby will have enough clothing inventory to last that long, because you are not going to want to invest a lot in clothing that will be outgrown and literally become obsolete on a quarterly basis.
With that thought in mind, the mental litmus test for whether your household’s laundry-as-a-service is resilient enough to handle this 5x — 7x increase in traffic versus your previous baseline is:
Relative to flossing, how much mental and physical effort does laundry require?
If the answer is “same or less” then you don’t need to read the rest of this blog — you are done! Go do something more productive!
But if you currently use a coin-op washing machine, or even a free-but-communal washing machine where you have to contend for this scarce resource, you may wish to consider upgrading this critical service and bringing your currently outsourced solution in-house.
The general outline is dead simple:
- Acquire a washing machine
- Remove all friction required to use this machine to achieve floss-parity
As always, the devil is in the details, so the following bits are presented with the hope that general lessons can be extracted from a specific approach, kinda like how you learn to optimize SQL queries by reading a bunch of random Stack Overflow answers for other people’s completely different queries until you experience a moment of zen-like clarity and suddenly you know how to optimize your own special snowflake query.
Greenfield Deployments
If you have an in-unit washer/dryer hookup, then congrats — you’ve found the warp zone to success. Go buy a standard washing machine (dryer optional) and claim victory. You can get a decent, used washing machine for around $100. If you’re paying $1.50 / load, you’ll hit break-even slightly after 2 months, even factoring in the additional utility costs you’ll have to pay.
The washer sits in a fixed location, it plugs into a set of standard I/O ports (cold water, hot water, drainage, electricity), and job done. Operationally speaking, not much has changed from your previously outsourced solution other than the increased convenience. Nice work.
Do keep in mind that the out-of-pocket cash savings, while nice, are not the point — the real goal is to reduce the overall operational friction of your entire new life by eliminating a complete class of problems, allowing you to spend more time focusing on different problems, namely how to keep your baby alive and also prevent your relationship with your partner from imploding.
Legacy Deployments
If you’re still reading by this point, you likely live in an older multi-unit dwelling and do not have a dedicated washer/dryer hookup. You may have noted this shortcoming when you moved in, but perhaps didn’t care or didn’t realize this limitation can be overcome.
Now that you care, you’ll be pleased to learn there is an entire subcategory of products that exist precisely for people like you, and these products are called “portable washers”.
As implied by the name, these are full-on washing machines, except they are small enough to be moved around on a regular basis. When not in use, they’re stored somewhere; but when required, they are deployed on-demand by moving them closer to a water supply such as your kitchen sink. Put it back when you’re done and everything’s gravy.
The biggest challenge you’ll have is connecting the washer to your existing general purpose water supply (aka your sink) which is not at all designed with a washing machine in mind.
To overcome this obstacle, the washer hopefully has a two-part “snap coupler”. The male half of the coupler permanently replaces the aerator in your existing faucet. The female half of the coupler connects to the water intake hose of the washer; there’s a spring-loaded piece that allows you to quickly attach and detach the hose to the male part that’s in your faucet. This is the magical bit that enables everything else.
Complications can arise if you are either missing parts (maybe you bought your machine used as I did with mine), or you have a non-standard faucet, like something with a wand attachment. Welcome to the world of plumbing. It’s a sucky place. (Although compared to Javascript frameworks, it’s absolutely delightful.)
The best advice I can offer here is to visit your local plumbing supply store, stat, and bring as many parts with you as you can. Don’t go to a big box store like Home Depot or Lowe’s, and don’t mess around trying to find the right part online. You will lose your mind, and time is not a commodity you have in surplus.
Since you are not an expert, you won’t have enough shared vocabulary to simply describe your problem in words. Bring all the parts with you, show them to the expert at the store, and describe your high level goal: “I want this piece to connect to that piece”. Manage for outcomes.
Portability
Now that you’ve solved your legacy integration problem, the only remaining piece of the puzzle is identifying and reducing any friction in the new workflow you’ve introduced, so that everyone in your household buys in to the new process.
You may be tempted to think that a “portable washer” is by definition, portable. As with so many things in parenthood, you’ll soon look back and laugh at your own naïveté. A surprising number of portable washers don’t have wheels! And while you could pick it up and move it every time you want to do a load, this routine will get old fairly quickly.
Obviously you want wheels. Perhaps less obviously is that you want a platform with wheels that can lock so the washer doesn’t wander around and destroy either itself or your kitchen during spin cycle. The whole point of our endeavor is to anticipate disasters and build resilient systems that won’t fail at the worst possible moment.
Putting It All Together
At this point, you are basically done. Washing a load of laundry is as simple as rolling your machine over to the sink, quick-snapping it with the coupler, plugging into power, locking the dolly wheels, and away you go.
As with any washing machine, ensure that the load is evenly balanced, else no matter how awesome your dolly is, you may still find yourself engaged in disaster recovery. In the worst case, not only will you break your washing setup, but you’ll tear out your faucet connections, making you and your landlord very sad. If the load is balanced and all four wheels on the dolly are locked out, everything should be solid as a rock.
Putting it away should be just as easy. Total setup and teardown time should be less than three minutes combined, and you’ll never have to hunt for quarters, trudge into a dank basement, or get frustrated waiting for your neighbors’ loads to complete ever again.
Final Parts List
Disclosure: clicking on any of the following links may generate revenue for me.
- Haier HLP24E portable washer — seems to be discontinued, but still available on Amazon. This is the larger version of the HLP21N, but as you can see from the images, it’s still pretty small compared to a fridge. The larger capacity allows you to wash almost as much as a full-sized washer, including bed sheets. It’s also high-efficiency (HE) detergent compatible.
- SPACECARE adjustable dolly with 4 locking wheels — all four wheels swivel and lock, and it’s adjustable in size. Beware of other dollies where two wheels are in a fixed orientation, you don’t want to be constantly fighting to roll it to the right spot
- Pipe sealant tape — be sure to use this when screwing together any plumbing bits
- Haier faucet quick connect adapter — in case you lose yours
- Haier water inlet hose — theoretically, these are supposed to be replaced every 5 years
Additional bonus: the quick snap coupler that is now on your sink should support most portable dishwashers, in case you want one of those too.
