apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Mostly just missing clothing when using a shared laundry. you never know if it was picked up by mistake or actually stolen.

I did have a white towel turn seagreen when it picked up color from a turquoise faux-pashmina that fell in the load.

i've been contemplating washing all my other towels w/my other "fauxminas" in order to get a rainbow pastel set.

Worst experience.

While in college (SUNY Buffalo, 1991) I would do laundry every 4 to 5 weeks. This was enabled by a large amount of "low-quality" clothes. Once while manning my six machines at the corner laundromat, a strange looking guy came in. He was strange looking only because of his attire and the fact that he came in without any clothes to wash. I was the only one who noticed because I was the only one using 6 machines and therefore had been there for a while.

He walks around the laundromat then grabs something out of someone's basket and quickly leaves. I walk over to the basket and told the woman that the guy just grabbed something. She looks through, notices some underwear missing, then tries to run after him. I follow her and suggest that she may want to just let him go. We get half two store fronts away and notice the guy, his back to us, his hands flailing, "doing stuff" to/with the underwear. We quietly walk back to the laundromat.

It doesn't end there as about 10 minutes later he walks in. She then used a coin-op phone (no cells back then) to call the cops. I left before they showed but... that is my worst laundry experience.

(Second-worst - trying to use a machine in Zurich that came only with German instructions.)

I was the perpetrator of a laundry nightmare. I washed a throw that I had inherited from a past roommate...I believe it was a really cheap chenille one. When I pulled it out to dry it, it has completely disintegrated in the wash. Try as I might, I couldn't get all the blue fuzzies out of the washer, so I'm sure the person who used it after me had quite an unpleasant surprise. (sorry to that person!)

i cannot tell you how many times chapstick/burt's bees has made it not only into the wash, but the worst part, the dryer.

just a couple of days ago, i forgot i hadn't gotten the all oil out of this sweatshirt i'd put zout on and washed it... let's just say i have oil spots all over t-shirts and tank tops. the worst!

and if you know you have a lot of pet hair on your clothing, shouldn't you do a cursory wipe-out as a courtesy??

I'm really obsessive about checking the machines before I put clothes in. Even if I smell bleach in there, I won't put a color load in, as I once had some remnant bleach spot some stuff. That said, a super-hot dime once ripped through a handful of my favorite tees during a wash cycle. ;-(

My biggest laundry disaster happened when I lived in England ... I'd just moved into a little house I was renting in Kent and it came with one of those undercounter all-in-one washer/dryers. The knob had apparently come off at some point and someone put it back on the wrong way ... when I loaded up my first load of clothes and thought I was washing it on cold, it was really set to hot wash, hot dry. I shrunk and faded my entire color load of clothes.

freshman year of college, my foray into dorm living... i had two loads of laundry stolen from the drier while I was one floor up in my room to get another load. the room had been empty when i ran upstairs for 15 minutes (and people leaving loads unattended for a much longer period of time was commonplace!) it included a whole bunch of band t-shirts i'd gotten at shows, my favorite pair of torn up, paint splattered jeans, and a track hoodie from the 60's i'd found and taken from my high school's athletic storage closet... all the pride and joys of my self-righteous 18-year-old closet.

The 1st night I spent in the house I'd inherited from my grandparents (who hadn't lived there full-time in years), I ran a load in the 1950's bright-turquoise washer.

Everything was hunky-dory until the rinse cycle--which just happened to happen at the exact moment I was sitting on the toilet. Hot soapy water gushed out of the toilet -- instant bidet!

(I later found out that tree roots had clogged the septic tank outlet.)

Luckily, I haven't had any traumatic laundry experiences... yet. I'm pretty anal about checking and preping the washer and dryer before I put my clothes in it.

The first time I used the laundry downstairs from my apartment after moving to New York right after college, I took everything, fresh out of the dryer, upstair to fold. I dumped it all on my bed and out floated an unwrapped condom....I didn't EVER leave my laundry out of my site again.

Someone left/added bleach in a washing machine that was still there - and potent - when I did my laundry. My brown shirt ended up with bleached out red spots. :(

The worst thing I've experienced was my neighbour in my apartment building put my clothes into the dryer when his stuff was done.
NOt really a big deal since he was giving me the rest of his dryer time that he wasn't using...

I've got a washer/dryer in the basement of the house I'm living in and we share it with the lady who lives in the basement. With 3 of us sharing it, we really don't come across any problems. The biggest one would probably be someone not emptying the dryer lint... Life's good in the laundry department, I guess...

bingo any such name!!

"and if you know you have a lot of pet hair on your clothing, shouldn't you do a cursory wipe-out as a courtesy??"

no kidding!
I think the people who live in pet hair just don't notice.
I just came up from the laundry and pulled a stiff red and white dog hair out of my unmentionables. Eeww.

Oh man...someone in my building once took out a load of wash while it was still washing, threw it on the dirty laundry room floor and then set an open bottle of bleach on top. Buh-bye load of laundry.

Our first married fight was actually the result of a laundry disaster. My husband learned to take the pens out of his pants pockets before tossing said pants in the washer, and I learned to NEVER wash all my favorite shirts in the same load.

More than a few times I opened the washer to find my landlord's little girl's urine soaked clothes sitting in the washer. He was too cheap to do the laundry in the middle of the day so he would leave it there to run the machine at night when he was using energy at lower costs. He was also handful to deal with so I couldn't say anything to him. Luckily the machine was free so I did a lot of empty loads of bleach and water to clean out the machine.

Mine was when I just had moved in to a rental in Sacramento, CA fron NYC and the hose drained into the laundry tub. The hose moved as the water started flowing out and soapy water got ALL over the laundry room and kitchen. I didn't have a mop or anything yet, so I had to run across the street to a new neighbor and borrow to fix the mess, but got really clean floors out of it. Then I put a big rubber band so the hose wouldn't move after that. I only lived there for 3 months before I moved back to So Cal.

I'm over it now
....Thanks to a really nice dinner in which I made him pay for 4 of our friends too. But the other day, man, I was so piping angry I yelled loud and my daughter and her friend came into the kitchen and when they saw me my daughter says to her friend " uh, lets go play outside". I had just gone to the goodwill and spent 50 dollars on some clothes for myself. I was really happy with my purchases, because not only did my picks fit me, almost everything I got was brand new and of some considerable original $$$$)(I am still not fitting into my pre-baby clothes). So I get home and toss it all into the wash, but hadn't started it up yet. T comes in and starts to add some of his nasty, dirty, art-covered things. (normally I wouldn't let his stuff share my washer, but our washer is so excellent it doesn't matter anymore), so anyhow, I ask, because you know I just have to ask, if he checked his pockets. right? Well, he answers all snotty kinda, yeah he did. yeah right. I just know I'm going to be picking tissues off of everything, but whatever. It's like my job. bit later, he puts everything in the dryer and leaves.
bit bit later, I'm taking clothes out and I see that everything, I mean everything is covered in big ass splotches of black ink. Here's where I screamed some profanity and my girl and her friend come into the kitchen and quickly make their exit. Now, I know $50 isn't a ton of money and I would spend that in a heartbeat on something other than clothes. But to spend that kind of money on myself, it just has to be the right timing, planets all aligned and everything. arrghh, it made me so mad. It will be years before I'm in that kind of shopping mood again or have the patience and time to pick over clothes.
but like I said. I'm over it now.

Worst laundry nightmare: when I washed my new, expensive Lands' End flannel sheets and I got bleach spots on one pillowcase (from somebody else's bleach) and had the other one stolen! I was not happy.

Best laundry revenge: I had a pair of shorts and a really cute kitchen towel stolen out of my laundry. Later, the super genius thief washed them in his or her laundry and I saw them and stole them back! HA!

Where is that super-cute laundry hamper from?

The cute hamper is from The Container Store.

i used the shared laundry room in my apartment building in LA during the middle of the day on a week day. who's home, ya know? if had been maybe 10 minutes after the wash cycle had finished and when i came back to put it in the dryer - ALL my underwear was missing. I hadn't done laundry in a while, so there was a huge percentage of my underwear in that load. SOOO gross! of course i didn't want it back, but i wanted to catch the person who stole it! never did, moved away, but still miss some of my favorite underwear...

I live in a 3 unit building and my husband and I have lived there for a long time. Usually everyone is pretty cool and when I'm doing laundry I'll just leave my quarters down there. Well, I caught the newest tenant red-handed using my quarters. It was really embarrasing for her and for me to have to say "those aren't yours".