Our first appliance nightmare was actually the hot water heater. Once we finally figured out how to turn the heater on after a late evening call to the owner of the house on the day of our arrival, at least one of us was warm and clean. I was clean, but not warm, unfortunately. It appeared that the water heater didn't really have enough hot water for two nice showers. We chalked it up to not having enough time to fully warm up. Tuesday night the kids had warm showers. At least Jacob and Cameron's were warm. Katie's shower, the third of the night, was a bit lukewarm. This water heater was starting to aggravate me. Wednesday morning Steve hopped in and stepped out clean and warm. No problems. My turn. I couldn't even get past lukewarm. I didn't even get into the shower but decided to wait to see if the water heater needed to warm up. However, an hour later and the water was even colder. A little more than miffed, I sent my husband a message to talk to the property manager to get this fixed. After much cajoling, a plumber was sent out on Friday to rectify the situation. It turns out the owner knew of a possible problem with the heating unit on the water heater. Once that was replaced all was well. The three kids can even take showers successively and each have equally comfortable water. Aaah. Problem solved. Now that we were all clean, we had to do something about our clothing.
When Steve found the house and looked it over, he knew that there was only a washing machine and no tumble dryer. The owner was not interested in installing a tumble dryer. We received permission to install one ourselves. When we arrived on Monday, we actually ended up at a mall in Camberley where I picked up the latest Argos catalog. For those of you who can remember the old Sears catalogs and maybe even stopping at the catalog only sites to place orders, you will be able to imagine an Argos store. However, now there are computer terminals to enter your order right there. There is little merchandise in the store; however, my kids are sneaking off to bed with the tome of a catalog to dream of Christmas Wish Lists for Santa! I found a tumble dryer and a refrigerator model that I thought would do the trick for us and passed the information off to Steve. He actually ordered the items for me since internet access was still not available to me. Argos is much better than SKY, our internet, tv, phone provider. SKY informed us it would take 10 days before they could come out and install our utilities (I'm still waiting, they come on Saturday), but Argos said they would call on Friday to arrange delivery. Today is Monday and by 10:24am two lovely men set up my dryer and even gave me a tip to hook up the washer better. They also installed a larger refrigerator. By 10:45 the washing machine was going. Success.
Now I just want to expound a bit on the washing machines and dryers here in the UK. First, they are smaller. Not a little smaller, I mean really smaller. My Rubbermaid laundry basket filled with clothes will fill my machine in Illinois. I do have a really great He Frontloader. I found today that the same basket will actually be split into three loads for the machine here. The dryer doesn't fit anymore than that either. Second, wash time is much longer. The first load that I put into the machine was a load of whites that I was doing in warmer water anyway, so a long cycle is good, so I skipped pressing the "Quick Wash" button. Two Hours and Twenty minutes later the wash was done and I could open the door! If I had pressed Quick Wash, the cycle would have been done about 45 minutes earlier. It has something to do with eliminating a rinse cycle. I must admit, my clothes are really clean. The dryer really isn't much better, but I do have the option of High Heat or Low Heat. I put in some light colored shirts and shorts for 60 minutes at the lower heat setting and everything was pretty much still wet at the end. I don't want to kill my clothes with the high heat, but for 20 minutes I took my chances and everything was dry. So far I have done five loads today and will have another done before bed. Yeah!
Now the refrigerator. Steve told me the refrigerator was small. The one that was installed in the house already is about 132 cubic liters. That probably doesn't mean much, so I am including pictures. The picture of the one with the food in it is the one that was in the kitchen. We were going to see about bringing over our refrigerator from the US (it was purchased in South Africa...really, another long story there) but the company won't insure or pay to transport appliances. If we shipped it on our own we would have probably paid more than getting one here. It was best to not have a U.S. sized refrigerator anyway as I am not sure it would have fit through the doorways or in the narrow space in the kitchen. We moved the smaller one into the laundry room which is now a bit crowded, but workable. My mother-in-law will be so happy to visit and find cold drinks in the house. Our first overseas assignment in Holland found us negotiating with a refrigerator the size of the one here, but we didn't consider installing a bigger one. When it came to deciding if the milk would be cold or the Diet Coke, the milk for the three kids under age 5 won out every time and I learned to drink warm soda. Now we can luxuriate in cold pop and juice! I feel like we have arrived.
Here is the one the owner installed:
Here is my new one:
So as long as no circuits pop as I overload the system with more work, we should be in good shape. Happy Laundering to All!
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