High-Rise Life: Caught Up in the Laundry Room Spin Cycle

By Barbara Cline

Have you ever gotten up at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning to do a load of laundry because you know you will have to compete with 100 other people for those eight machines?

You quietly dash onto the elevator and ride downstairs to check if any machines are available. Success! You have outsmarted the entire building. The machines are empty.

You dash back upstairs, and drag four overflowing baskets of laundry onto the elevator. As you re-enter the laundry room, disaster has struck. Five other high-risers have also used the no-fail 6 a.m.-on-a-Sunday-morning strategy and you are now sixth in line.

But we’re in luck: Clever computerized systems like Check My Wash from Coinmach (www.coinmach.com) and LaundryView (www.laundryview.com) have been invented to allow you to monitor the status of all the washers and dryers in your laundry room.

One of the first high-rises in the neighborhood to install such as system is the Brandywine Apartments at 4545 Connecticut Avenue.

Are you using a laundry monitoring system? Please share your story with us. And if you don’t have a laundry monitoring system, what do you think about this new approach? Comment below or contact us at [email protected].

We will do a follow-up laundry article in the future from high-riser feedback.