Posts Tagged ‘Laundry’

More News from Central Alberta

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I hate to return to my laundry fetish, the subject of a recent post, but I saw something new (to me) this week. Purely by accident I met one of the Masterpiece residents on my tour and she invited me to see her suite.  A clothes lover, she found her unit short of closet space so installed an armoire in the bathroom. I think she got it at Rona or something like that. It looked great. In another closet she installed a washer/dryer—the kind that only requires 110 volts, the maximum allowable in her building (in individual units that is). I used a machine like this in Tokyo recently, but I have never seen them used in seniors’ buildings in North America. You can hook them up virtually anywhere as long as there is a plumbing line nearby. They take about 3 ½ hours to wash and dry a load but you don’t have to do any transferring of wet clothes and the machines are very energy efficient. Research done in the States (admittedly by LG, a major manufacturer of laundry equipment), suggests that in-suite laundry increases rent potential by $40 to $100 per month, and condo prices by $5,000 to $15,000.

For people who don’t want their own in-suite laundry equipment, communal laundry rooms have come a long way in some seniors’ housing projects. Flat-screen TVs, fridges and microwaves, and comfortable chairs can transform the mere act of washing and drying your laundry into a whole new experience. Years ago we wrote a report for CMHC called Aging Tenants in the Private Rental Market. The objective of the report was to discover how private landlords were coping with aging residents. Very well, as it turned out, but one of the memories of that report that has stuck with me was the laundry room in a big building in Victoria. The laundry room was the social hub of the building—people read there, or played cards with their neighbours, or just talked.  Of course it was a big room, the only laundry room in the building. People sometimes think that laundry rooms on every floor of a seniors’ building are absolutely necessary, but I have seen many situations where central laundry rooms have worked fine.

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