As I have mentioned numerous times, I am both lazy and guilt-ridden. This pretty much means that I only accomplish tasks pertaining to housework when people other than my husband are going to witness my tolerance for filth, and I am shamed into doing something about it. That scenario is now upon me.

Here’s some background. We bought our gigantic house in January of this year. By normal people’s standards, it’s probably average, by mcmansion standards, a bit small. Regardless, two people in a five bedroom-2bath house seems extravagant to me. We haven’t lived in this much space since we left the Cities, and that includes a laundry room.

Yes, after years of shlepping piles of dirty clothes and rolls of quarters back and forth to the laundromat every week or so, the idea of my very own washer and dryer in a designated space, where I could tend to our skivvies in absolute privacy, seemed downright decadent. Not so fast.

Being that we got our house at a bank-owned bargain, I was armed with lowered expectations about the appliances left behind. We were pleasantly surprised that the furnace and hot-water heater were working perfectly. Once I vacuumed the four cups of cat-food out of the washer, it functioned without a problem. The dryer burned up the first time we used it. It sits out in the garage in a corner where crap gets piled on top of it.

So, for a while, I hung clothes on my Ikea clothes rack (the best thing I ever bought from Ikea, so of course they don’t make it anymore). It worked fine for some stuff, but everything had a film of lint, and bath towels dried into scratchy sheets of plywood. No one needs that much exfoliating.

I eventually gave into the shlepping. The laundromat’s two doors down from my husband’s shop, so about a block and a half away. Not a horrible jaunt, but I reminded him that it wasn’t going to fly when winter came and the streets turned icy.

We stumbled upon a gorgeous dryer in a neighbor’s driveway when we were out garage sale-ing this last summer. It was only a year old and we got a great deal on it. The only problem? It’s a gas drier. There’s no gas line in the laundry room.

So, after months of nagging, and with the weather turning cold (not sure which one did the trick), I was informed last night that our designated handyman will come put the gas lines in…tomorrow.

That means tonight I have to clean like a mad woman. Not only does the laundry room need to be cleared out and washed, and some sheetrock  and the old dryer vent removed, but the basement also has to be scrubbed clean. I also have to clean the rest of the downstairs…you know, on the off chance the handyman has to pee. I need to make our house look like it’s occupied by civilized human beings, instead of the dirty animals with marginal social skills that we really are.

That’s all right. It needs to be done anyway. I’m having family over for Christmas, so the cleaning was a foregone conclusion. I was just hoping to procrastinate a tiny bit longer. At least I’ll be able to dry my clothes at home while I’m cleaning. Don’t tell the other appliances. They might think I’m getting off easy and break down out of spite.

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