Hi All!
So while i’m back at home for the summer I thought it would be a good idea to talk about a big worry students have when starting university – HOW AM I GOING TO CLEAN MY CLOTHES?
I’m not too sure about the standard accommodation but where I lived within en-suite accommodation (Clarice Cliff) the laundry room is in the building! I don’t really find that I need to do washing a lot and will store it up in a laundry basket to make sure that I am doing a lot of washing for the money that I am paying. I believe it’s £2.70 a wash and £1.50 for a dry. which isn’t too bad!
My biggest tip is finding a quiet time to do the washing, the machines are old and take FOREVER, so find a few hours you have free where you can tend to your washing. There are 4 washing machines and 4 dryers for Clarice so 9 times out of 10 the machines are busy so try and figure out when it is quietest. My flat found out that this is either during the day (when people are in classes), preferably in the morning because then it is empty! Or really late at night, I know a flat mate that would do her washing at like midnight because all the machines would be full.
Invest in a laundry rack/dryer contraption thingy if you don’t want to pay for your drying. As much as this comes in handy it can take up a lot of space in your room which can get a little annoying. I never found that my laundry would dry on a rack in my room in Clarice, I don’t really know why and ended up just giving up and using the dryers. HOWEVER they take 80 minutes so sometimes they are all full and it’s a good idea just to hang up your stuff to dry so that it doesn’t crease. I think I actually ended up using my drying rack to hang my coat on after I got soaked in torrential rain and other than that it didn’t really get used that often because it was just easier to dry things in the tumble dryer! You can decide if it’s a worthy purchase before moving to uni but I will tell you now the most mine was used for was a drunk tent tunnel as I was packing to come home!
Using the machines is tough if you aren’t really used to doing your own washing, luckily my parents had taught me how to use our machines at home and so I just had to work the machines at Clarice. It can get rather expensive to do loads of different types of washes and can also take far too much time, so my best advice is to split your clothes into a light and a dark wash (easy enough hey?). This way you’re not going to be dying your prized clothes crazy colours so everything stays in tact! All my darks and bright coloured clothes would go into one wash and then my really lights would go in a different wash. That way it only is £5 and all my washing is done!! I never had to ring my parents for advice and more often than not was called upon for help!
If you are feeling brave enough you can also iron your clothes. I’ve been brought up doing the ironing for my family of six so this wasn’t something I was nervous of doing because I know I can do it without leaving a huge burn mark on my favourite shirt. BUT I never really found the need to iron my clothes, even coming from the dryer they were hung up straight away and never really creased, it’s about doing it quickly so that you don’t have to iron anything! To be fair I could never really be bothered to iron my clothes and they never really needed it anyway. However I did have an iron and small desk ironing board in my room just in case, this came in rather handy if we were going out and my favourite shirt was a mess or even breaking into a flat mates room whilst they are out and cleaning everything, including ironing all their creased clothes at the bottom of their wardrobe (you are welcome Joe!).
Hopefully this will show you that doing your laundry at university isn’t really as scary as it’s made out to be and in reality you can make it through the year with no clothes casualties! If you are still nervous, get some practice in before you start university just so that you are a bit confident instead of standing in the laundry room, crying down the phone at your mum because all six options on the washing machines sound scary! Go forth and conquer that dirty laundry!
Speak to you soon,
Rebecca
xxx
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