Having to do your laundry is one of the many unfortunate things in life.
Even if it’s tedious, you have to do it. So, of course, if you’re living on campus during the school year, it’s still going to be a chore that needs doing. Unless your family lives really close by and you can just do laundry there, a lot of us need to make do with the laundry facilities on campus.
Depending on the dorm you live in, the quality of the laundry rooms will differ. The larger dorms will naturally have a bigger space for laundry and smaller dorms have smaller spaces. If you live in one of the Owl’s Nest dorms, there’s a separate laundromat on Butler Court. This is what the existing infrastructure already is, so it would be impractical to change it. However, there is a disparity in quality between these different laundry spaces.
I’ve obviously not been in every dorm so I can’t speak to how every laundry room is, but I think in my four years here, I’ve been able to see the spectrum of quality. Some are very good and convenient, and others are less so.
For example, the Living and Learning Commons (LLC) had a good facility. It was in the dorm building and had lots of washing machines and dryers. The elevators also make it easy to go downstairs to the first floor with a basket of laundry. The LLC is also a newer addition to the KSC campus and is one of the bigger dorms, so it has more room to include these things.
However, the Pondside 2 laundry facility is far from the relative convenience you can find at the LLC. For starters, the space itself is very small. Again, with the size of the building and the little free space not allotted to dorm rooms, this is understandable and there’s no good way to expand it. However, although the dorm building itself might be small, it houses a lot of people since it’s a suite dorm building. Not every Pondside 2 building has its own laundry room and students who live there will have to go to a different building to do their laundry. It’s easy to see how a laundry room with two washing machines and three dryers can get backed up.
My problem isn’t necessarily even with the size, although it is irritating to try to do your laundry only to have to wait half an hour for someone else’s cycle to be finished. My main issue is in upkeep.
For instance, I can’t recall ever having an issue with the machines in the LLC laundry room or even in the Butler Court laundromat. Sometimes one would break, but there were always enough machines in total that the loss of one wasn’t felt that badly. However, if the space is much smaller, like in Pondside 2, the loss of even one machine is a hard hit.
Ever since this semester started, one of our three dryers has been out of order (and it’s the big one). One of the laundry machine doors was also broken until very recently. So, for some reason, two Pondside 2 buildings have been sharing two washing machines and two dryers. I guess we’re all just lucky none of the washing machines have broken, besides having to manhandle one’s door closed for several months.
The dryer has just been repaired last week. I’m unsure as to the reason why the dryer was still out of order, months later. I don’t know if similar delays in repairs are common in other laundry facilities across campus, because most other laundry rooms have a lot of machines. Even if they are larger and the loss of one machine isn’t so bad, I don’t think a precedent of never repairing them for months should be set.
While the size can’t be helped, these sorts of repairs are very basic quality-of-life matters. We all need to do our laundry, and it only makes it more of a pain if you have to wait behind people’s laundry. No one wants students to go to class in stinky clothes, least of all us students!
Orion Corbin can be contacted at
