Lights & Dominoes

We’ve been taking advantage of the cold and snowy weather to work on some projects around the house. After all these years I know that folks seem to either love or hate IKEA. I’m in the love column. Our experience this past week with the Sanda track lighting system has done nothing to diminish my feelings. Sanda (which seems to be available around the world) allows you to secure flat tracks to the ceiling and easily add light fixtures. In our old home, the biggest challenge, as always, is that there isn’t a straight or plumb line in the whole house. That didn’t phase Sanda.

As with most of our home improvement adventures this was a matter of dominoes. We finally replaced our nearly two decade old washer and slightly younger dryer with an energy efficient front loader washer and a companion dryer. My friends on Twitter were kind enough to suffer through my venting as I tried to adjust to a totally new way of doing laundry. (Thank you Morgan and Wendy!) One of the biggest frustrations was I couldn’t lift the lid and check as my clothes sloshed happily about in a tub full of sudsy water. There is a large round window on the washer, but there is no sudsing, no sloshing, no micro-managing of the load.

My inability to be hands-on coupled with a dramatically longer washing cycle repeatedly found me standing in front of the washer, with a very bright flashlight, fretting over whether or not the clothes were really, truly getting well and truly clean! That’s how the lighting in the laundry room came up for discussion. The old fluorescent shop-light fixture Chuck had improvised ages ago was no longer cutting the mustard. So on our last trip to IKEA, measurements in hand, we purchased all the Sanda bits and pieces we thought we would need.

After more than a month with the new washer and dryer, I have to admit, I’m beginning to get used to them and this new fangled way of doing laundry. And now that we have the Sanda lights, the room is a much more pleasant space to work in. Now if I could just learn to fully trust my washing machine...