Introducing the Utility Area

It's outside! Just off the kitchen. I have a little patio area, although well covered within the building, where all the laundry items are and off of that is a storage room with slider curtain. Pretty straightforward area right?

There are little quirks though.

-Everything is a step down. Step down to the kitchen, another step down to the laundry room. Same goes for bathrooms. I guess if I flood it will be somewhat contained ;).

-Instead of regular doorstops there are giant magnets to hold the doors in place so the wind doesn't send them flying (since you are outside).

-Took me a week to figure out how to wash clothes!

-First, flip on the electricity to the outlet. Every outlet has it's own turn-on switch here that needs to be on before anything plugged in will work.

-Second, turn on the water. Yep, there's a valve into the wash machine that needs to be on. This tripped me up big time :).

-Third, requires "low suds" detergent since it's a front loader. Thankfully I was told this before hand and didn't mess it up.

-Fourth, the dryer's lint trap has screens all around the dryer opening and if you don't wipe it clean - you end up with lint all over your clothes!

-Dryer's in fact aren't that common. Instead, many people hang up their clothes to dry. I assume that is part of the reason for the outdoor utility area. I have two curtain rods on my ceiling with ropes to drop them down and take them up. I can easily hang stuff out to dry - it's quite nice actually. Although with the humidity here it can take a day or more to get things dry.

-The store room is pretty big. It has my luggage now and when my bed arrives on the cargo shipment, my current mattress goes in there.


Small area, but works quite nicely. Haven't had my own washer/dryer in a long time. Once I figured them out, it was great! :)