"These sheets are cold, Mum." Isla said it on a Wednesday night in November with one hand flat on her duvet cover, and she was right. They weren't cold. They were damp along the seams, because that morning I had put the bedding for three beds on one heated airer, a clothes horse and two radiators and expected a miracle. That was the night the rota went on the fridge.
There are four of us, three beds, a stack of towels and exactly one heated airer. Everything depends on the airer. Wednesday's wash is where it either works or it doesn't.
The rota
It's an A5 sheet under a magnet next to the meal plan whiteboard, in my handwriting, with a box to tick for each Wednesday. Here is what it says:
- Every Wednesday: four bath towels, four pillowcases and the bath mat
- Week A: Isla's and Alfie's duvet covers and fitted sheets
- Week B: our duvet cover and fitted sheet, plus the sofa throw
- Monday and Saturday: tea towels, kitchen cloths and hand towels, in whichever load has room
Bedding is fortnightly for everyone, with extra washes when they're needed. Alfie is six, and the odd night when a glass of water goes over or he has a nosebleed means his bed gets done more often than the rota says. I don't mind. I would rather rewash a duvet cover than put him in a cold damp bed.
Why Wednesday
Wednesday is one of my days off, and once the Aldi shop is put away I have the house to myself until lunchtime. The beds are stripped by 9:20 and the machine is on by 9:30. Each bed has two sets of sheets, so the second set goes on straight away and nothing has to be dry before bedtime. That was the real fix. Not the rota, but the second set. When we had one set per bed, the wash had to be dry by seven o'clock, and in November it wasn't.
Towels go in first, because they take longest to dry, and the pillowcases fit round them. Then the duvet covers go on the airer tent at the dining end of the lounge with the dehumidifier running beside it, and a fitted sheet goes over the clothes horse in the bay. The tent smells of warm cotton and, faintly, of the airer's plastic, a smell I have started to like. Mabel is on top of the warm washing by eleven. She has no opinion about the rota, but she does have a strong view about where the washing should be. By the time I leave for the 3:15 pick-up the tent is down, the beds are made and the lounge smells like clean washing.
What it costs
We're on the fixed energy price now, so a heated airer load of 2.4 kWh costs about 59p. It was 65p at the old rate. A towels-and-pillowcases Wednesday uses one airer load, so 59p. A bedding Wednesday uses two, £1.18, plus 28p for six hours of the dehumidifier. That's £1.46 on top of the machine itself, every other week, which is less than I'd have guessed from the amount of steam on the windows.
The rota isn't perfect. When Alfie had a cold in the first week of December, his sheets went through twice and the towels slid to Thursday, which broke the pattern for about nine days. Last week a load of Rob's work things got left in the machine overnight, went sour and had to go round again. Nothing is as tidy as the A5 sheet makes it look. But the sheet means that I don't have to remember. It's on the fridge, I look at it on Tuesday evening before bed, and by Wednesday morning I know what's coming off the beds.
Isla reads it too. Last Wednesday she told me it was Week A and that her sheets were "due", which is more interest in laundry than I'd expected from a nine-year-old. I took it as a sign of trust in the system. I think she mostly wanted the new set, which smells of the airing cupboard.
Next Wednesday is Week B, ours. I've put our second set of sheets on the top shelf of the airing cupboard where I can reach them without a chair.
