How do you do laundry on a narrowboat?

A while ago I asked my readers what they would like to read about on the blog, and I got plenty of interesting answers. Curiously there were several questions about doing the laundry!

Jess said, “I'm going to have a washing machine on my new boat (very exciting), but how on earth am I going to dry sheets in winter? Do people just use laundrettes in winter for big things? Any ideas?!”

I have used the launderette for sheets. But often I will just peg it folded over the tiller. Peg it tight - I lost a double sheet into the Cut on a windy day! I didn't see it go... I assume it blew away and then sank eventually. Indoors I hang sheets over long copper pipes that are part of the heating system, or over the curtain rail across the front door, and sometimes over the shower door - anywhere I can really. On a hot summer day I sometimes spread them across the roof; steel gets very hot! Sheets or clothes will then dry on the roof very quickly. It reminded me of when I was in India, watching the ladies of Varanasi spread their laundry on the Ghats beside the Ganges.

I also have a Brolley Mate which can be used to hold a lightweight rotary washing line onto the tiller. We have a trad stern on our boat but it rises above the roof level and half of the washing line hangs over the canal.

On our last boat we had a rotary washing line that was held in a specially made hole in the deckboards (pictured.) Also, when in remote countryside I have been known to peg up a line in the trees or a hedge!

Ironing

Andy and Sue are planning to move aboard soon and asked me, “How do you do the ironing when not connected to shore power?”

Good question. On my first boat I had a little travel iron that ran off a 12volt plug – the kind you can plug into a cigarette lighter socket. It was rubbish!

Now I have a travel iron from Argos that requires an ordinary 240volt supply but I made sure that it was only 900 watts. Hinari Travel Steam Iron It runs off our 1500 watt pure sine wave invertor.

The Launderette Equation

Before we had a washing machine I was very frustrated about the amount of time I spent taking tiny children and lots of laundry, on foot, to the launderette.

I decided there must be a scientific equation for how posh an area is versus how close is the nearest launderette. The nicer the area you are visiting, the less likely there is to be a launderette. However, finding a launderette is not a problem in inner city areas.

The Launderette Equation for Boaters

(Local house price) / (commuter train fare to London) x (N) = distance to launderette from mooring.

Further research is required to ascertain N and calculate the distance of the boat from the launderette.

If you travel a lot get yourself a copy of the Aylesbury CanalSociety Launderette List. “Many boaters won't boat without it.”

Read more about launderettes and laundry in my boating life.

As with many parts of boating, there’s never just one solution to a problem. It takes all different boats and different boaters to find different ways of doing things. How do you do your laundry?

Reasons to be cheerful, 1,2,3

Photo by Phil Bassett www.boatshed.com

10 Things That Are Different About The New Boat

 

1.       Space. This ship has crossed the final frontier. More storage space means that the place is tidier. More space in general means we don’t have to tidy the toys up until the end of the day, instead of engaging in an ongoing all-day battle for floor space.

2.       The Doctor and I now have our own bedroom. We take it in turns to have lie-ins at the weekend. We don’t have to put a futon bed away in the morning or get it out at night. We can even go to bed at different times from each other if we like.

3.       There is a washing machine and a spin drier. (Click on launderettes in the labels list if you’ve not yet heard about my heroic struggle living with two small kids and no washing machine.)

4.       Big Sister can do colouring or make things with Play Doh in her own room at her fold-down table. (Her last room was the size of a double bed and contained just that, a double bed, nothing else.) Now she can have friends around to play in her bedroom. She says she would rather live in a house though ,

“Because then I could have bunk beds like my friend from nursery.”

5.       The toilet flushes, with electric and water. It’s so fancy! On our last boat the toilet just featured a kind of trap door that dropped you-know-what into the pit down below. (There is no glamour in the boating life.)

6.       There are side hatches that let in sunlight and air and a piece of sky. Through these we can chat to the swans and ducks who glide over the glittering water to greet us, and ask for bread. You can taste the freedom on the air.

7.       The kitchen sink empties with gravity, not an electric pump, just like you would expect a sink to do. A silly design on our last boat meant that you had to hold in a button to pump out the water after finishing the dishes. The plughole was below the water level, so an electric pump buzzes and gurgles, sucking water down plastic bendy tubes and out into the Cut.

8.       A different kind of water heater means that we have instant running hot water! Although the water tank is tiny; a thimble! We have to fill up every three days instead of every three weeks. (Or is that because of the fancy flushing toilet and the frequent use of the washing machine?)

9.       We have 240 volt three-pin electric plugs – just like in houses! But it is not a house. We can live where we like and change that place every two weeks.

10.   The New Boat is in The Countryside.  We sleep sound in the knowledge that bored London teenagers will not untie our mooring ropes and cast us adrift while we sleep. We glide through a world of blossomy trees and sunshiney green fields.  We picnic in meadows and wander beside reservoirs. We moor up near crumbling country pubs, and pass through quiet locks nodding at other boaters. Did I mention vast fields of glorious bright yellow rape seed? The New Boat is in The Countryside.


This is my first time joining in with Michelle's Friday Blog Hop. Click below to visit her blog and read other blogger's reasons to be cheerful - or join in with your own blog post! Her blog is called Mummy From the Heart. Michelle says, "Do you know what I believe are two of the fundamental keys to happiness? One, is to choose to be happy and the other is to want what you already have!"

The New Boat

It’s our first weekend of new owner-ship. We’re  on board The New Boat, for a visit, although we still live on The Old Boat. Big Sister wants to be helpful so I ask her to put the soap powder back near the washing machine.

“Mummy, where is the washing machine?”

“The utility room is between your bedroom and my bedroom!” I reply with glee.

It feels like we’ve gone on holiday to a lovely holiday home where everything is tasteful, lovely and stylish, but tomorrow and the next day we can come back again and again. The new boat is so big that one can take a stroll down along inside it. We wake up and know that we don’t have to fold our futon bed away. There is instant hot water when I do the dishes. After doing the dishes the sink empties with gravity! There’s no need to hold in the button to pump out the dishwater (that was a very silly arrangement on The Old Boat.) In the bathroom I tell Big Sister,

“Check this out – electric flushing toilet!” Whirr!
The girls’ room is the boatman’s cabin.
“Do you know that round window with the swan painted on the glass?” I ask my little one. “Do you know what a round window on a boat is called? A port hole!”
A curious mix of excitement and astonishment crosses her face. She pauses to think.
“And when I wake up I can look out my swan hole and see that it is morning time!”

Photo by Phil Bassett www.boatshed.com

A new imaginary friend has rocked up: Loudon Wainwright III; American comedy folk songwriter. He’s more cheerful than some of my other imaginary friends and he’s strumming away; a half remembered tune about how he can tell by the look on my face, that I just love this new bad ass place.  Then I remember that I don’t believe in imaginary friends anymore, and hope to make shiny new Real Friends, in The Countryside.  He obligingly disappears in a puff of smoke. I left the old boat, haunted with imaginary friends.  William Blake, Ye Olde Boat Wife, Tiny Tim Cratchett, Charles Lamb, Mick Jagger, RonnieWood,  John, Paul, Ringo and George, do not have permission to stow away on board The New Boat.

When I’m with Big Sister in her bedroom we cannot even hear Baby Sister and The Doctor in the living room! Our bedroom is the biggest bedroom I’ve ever seen on a narrowboat. There is a wardrobe, and room for a desk or writing bureaux and a chest of drawers. There is a real free standing bed, not a fitted cabin bed. It’s the first time in ten years that I’ve had a Real Bed, with a headboard and a footboard. I could poke my feet over the end of the bed if I wanted to – without hitting the bulkhead! 

Baby Sister enjoyed toddling from one end of the boat to the other. Until now she has got around with a mix of crawling and tentative toddling. But this weekend she just walked the whole time, arms slightly bent, hands excitedly held in the air. From that weekend onwards she hardly ever crawled again. Space, on this boat, was one small step for baby, and one giant leap for babykind.  

I strolled the lengthy stroll down to the utility room (also the engine room), with a manual in my hand. I read out the instructions. I loaded in the laundry and noticed a stray squatter had been caught up in the laundry bundle. He scuttled across the pillow cases.

“Quick!” I alerted The Doctor. “There’s a massive spider! I don’t want him to get - what a horrible way to drown...”
“...in an incy-wincident!” finished The Doctor.
The Doctor gently removed Incy and put him out of the kitchen window. Then we trekked back to the other end of the boat.
The Doctor pressed the buttons. Green lights came on and we heard the sound of running water and whirring electric. We’ve got a washing machine! I squealed. We hugged. Out came the sunshine. And Incy Wincy Spider climbed up the spout again.

(Written on 12^thMarch - my blog lags behind my Real Life.)

Laundry day

Moving On

21st January

Mr Too-Friendly is always hanging out on his back deck waiting for someone to talk to. His back deck is outside my kitchen window. He told me he went to see Johnny Boater’s band play last night.
“They were quite good.”
I told him the nearest laundrette doesn’t do service washes and gave him directions to the one that does.
“I mean, for the price of a beer, you know, and then you don’t have to sit in a launderette for two hours.”
“I like your thinking,” he muses.
On the towpath I met The Sound Engineer. Years ago we worked together in a recording studio. I bought my first boat. He loved the idea, he said,
“I might get one of those one day.”
Now he’s moored down at The Narrowboat pub.
“We’ve been there a while, we like it round here. We were all at Vicky Park, loads of us. And they did a big clear out, gave everyone tickets and moved everyone on.”



The Narrowboat Pub



Observations of Harlow

7th September
I admitted that Harlow Town Park is a triumph of modern planning, as I enjoyed walking to the library past nature reserves and through trees and lawns. I dropped the laundry in the launderette at The Stow, a pedestrianised shopping area. This is the first launderette I have ever been in which there is a sign displayed that forbids the drinking of alcohol in the launderette. I wonder if the shopkeepers have to stash the tinfoil behind the counter around here? Our mooring in Harlow is in the park, and beautifully rural, and yet I’m thrilled to be near all modern conveniences like the launderette, the supermarket and the library. However the Samaritans phone number as a permanent fixture on Harlow Town train platforms, reminds me of the train track suicides at Harlow Mill two years ago, on our last boating visit to Harlow. There is such hopeful pride in the original planning of this new town, when you see the historical plans for the new station proudly displayed at the station. It is a place where I feel the Yin and Yang of two extremes co-existing in concrete harmony. I discover the library at The Stow is closed until 1pm, so I write this in a cheap cafe with frothy coffee and marmalade on toast.

The End of the Rainbow

10th August

Since having children I have developed an irrational travel phobia. I’ll just nip out to the supermarket in Harlow to get toddler pull-ups I thought – but I don’t have a car or a driving licence, so it was two hours from our boat to the supermarket. Although Harlow is just one train stop away there was a severe train delay and two flat tyres on a three wheeled pushchair. It took one hour and ten minutes to get home from the supermarket by train and walking to and from the stations. It only takes one hour ten minutes to walk there down the towpath, without any trains involved at all.

The laundry run is now a joy not a chore. It is a country walk and a chance to practice my improvised botany. On the way to the lock cottage I see so many nameless wild flowers. I’m no horticulturalist so I have to create my own names for them: purple tufties, cabbage-white butter-flowers, purple pansy clusters, golden grasses sun-bleached and crispy, spiky purple flower’d thistle balls, and lavender look-a-likes shaking with laughter on the towpath. And O’ sweet bushels of pinkle-bells that tinkle with the sounds of summer.

At the lock The Hay Man is leaning over the footbridge railings and chatting to The Husband of the Lady of The Lock. The Hay Man came here as a baby evacuee during the war, and he never left. He lives in one of the chalets on the chalet estate. We see him now and then on his way back from Hunsdon Mead where he collects hay for his horse and then pulls it back home on a trolley.

It rained for most of the day. At home I noticed water leaks in places that I didn’t know we had places. I put a bucket in the corridor and felt miserable about the boat. A narrowboat broker would now call it a ‘project boat’. It has had the hull re-plated but it is old and not big enough or good enough for my two girls. We need more storage space for clothes and toys. If only The Doctor and I could have our own bedroom we would have a writing desk in there... But I wonder what I really want. ..a bigger boat with a washing machine, a caravan by the sea, or a two bedroom semi-detached in suburbia? Should we rent a flat? Could we rent a bigger boat? The Doctor says a caravan will be on some depressing caravan site, all boxed in among too many other caravans and he’d rather live in a house in suburbia. This can’t happen because of my suburb phobia.

I am anxious about our future finances, income and work. Even the willows weep for me, at the bottom of the mead garden. As they drizzle tears into the lesser Stort on the far side of the field, I consider DIY anxiety remedies:

Anxiety Busters

What advice would you give to a friend?
Break down tasks – problem solving
Give yourself more relax time
Listen to a hypnosis mp3 download

The children are in bed and I think it has stopped raining. So I go out on the back deck and see my first ever rainbow sunset! First, I saw the rainbow, arching from the field on the east of the river and stretching to the bow of our boat. It’s huge but seems so near, right here, just across the river, bending and curving over our boat. With meadows ahead of me and meadows behind, I look all around and think I must be the only human to see this enormous rainbow. So, I allow myself to imagine that it was put there just for me. I was unable to capture it in a photograph, it just appeared washed out in the preview frame. I turned behind me to check our heavenly meadow and there is the most amazing sunset I have seen since we’ve been moored here. The clouds are pink, orange and yellow, intensely striking and streaking across the sky. The clouds are rolling and sweeping over the embers of the sun’s golden glow, seeping through cracks in the sky and leaking out, the paper sky absorbing the wet paint colours sponge-like, blurring and fading into one another, lighting up the sky with a passionate intensity. Clouds are sucked into a vanishing point, perspective is speeding away from me across the green field to where the lumpy bumpy shadowy skyline of dark trees meets these heavenly grumblings of clouds that are now already turning ominously red and purple. Fluffy fragile grasses stand silently beside me and share in my awe as we witness the sky.
Yet, in a few minutes it was all over. The sun crept off over the horizon, the sky became a washed out faded denim blue, and when I looked behind me, my rainbow was gone. I’m not religious or even superstitious but if I was looking for a heavenly sign to comfort me in these times when I am prone to worry, then that was it. More than just a ray of hope, a rainbow sunset painting the evening sky was a fierce lightshow competing with the misty transient vulnerability of a vast rainbow, existing for a moment in time.

Later, I remembered that I had said that Hunsdon Mead and Roydon would be the end of the rainbow for us.

Launderette Country

Beware ye boat wives the distance ye moor from the launderette. With the double pushchair and a rucksack I can take two loads of washing (one dark, one light) and there’s still room for the children! St Margaret’s vicarage is also encased in holly. Is this a holy thing? To be hedged in and protected by sacred prickles? As I push the buggy down a leafy country lane, five bedroom family homes with pillar-flanked front doors make way for semi-detached suburbia and trades men’s vans; subcontractors of the construction industry. A warning to the intrepid Boat-Wife, you are now entering Launderette Country.

The ‘get fit’ trainers are now discarded, I am trip-trapping in my red sandals past a golden cropfield of cricket noises – the insect not the ballgame. At the brow of the hill we pass the redbrick Victorian waterworks with the round window.

Back home I use the internet to locate local parks and The Doctor takes baby sister swimming. My daughter and I sample two different playgrounds in the summer sun. She covers one eye.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“I’m winking,” she replied.