Does Size Matter?

*Note: Sorry for the lousy looking formatting and random font changes. Blogger is doing some stuff that I am not asking it to. But I guess you can still read it...

London is a big city. But in another sense it is very small:

No walking on many of the absurdly narrow sidewalks. Especially since they are the day drinking/smoking area, too.

Fun small cars that you never heard of like this Ford Frodo.

On some streets they've given up on cars altogether. Like.

Our house in Amherst was not large by American standards – particularly in usable living space: three smallish bedrooms, three bathrooms that, due to size and untenable fixtures, added up to one and two half baths, a living room/dining room that was comfortable, but not large. We did have a lot of semi-livable space - a weird breezeway that functioned as mud room/three-season hang out, a damp basement family room and a stuffy attic office - as well as tons of storage. When we purchased the house it was our intention to renovate and make those spaces more comfortable and roomy but when we started to look into it, we decided it was too much to spend on too little house. 

Despite its shortcomings I liked the modest size of our house. It was easy to care for, cozy, and it permitted me to indulge in a kind of snobbery of un-pretentiousness. I sometimes even fantasized about smaller spaces - small scale living that required clever solutions to the everyday activities of eating and sleeping. However, as much as I may like the idea of a tiny house, I also like a degree of privacy and solitude - hard to come by in a micro-domicile even with only one wife and one child. Moving into a flat in London posed the perfect challenge: to find a balance between my desire for a smaller space and at the same time the ability to isolate myself on occasion. Plus, there wasn’t much choice – the cost of living (very high) and the general scale of dwellings (hobbitty) in London made a much smaller place a practical necessity.

Without going into a lot of detail about the search (seventeen viewings in two days), I found one. Our new flat is two bedrooms, one bath, but the proportions are nice. It doesn't seem in any way cramped with the exception of the entryway which won't comfortably accommodate more than one person putting on shoes or gathering items for departure. There is sufficient storage space and enough “zones” to permit the three of us to stay out of each other’s way as necessary. And there is plenty of room to host a houseguest or four for a few nights at least. We have two air mattresses - deluxe!

That said there are some things to get used to...

A lot of people told us we would need to adjust to the U.K.’s smaller appliances. Truly, when viewing flats I was stunned at the number of offerings that had dorm-sized refrigerators, and in a few cases no freezer at all. (Insert British ice-cube joke here.) Kitchens were undersized on the whole. To me this raises a classic chicken/egg question: Do Londoners drink rather than eat because their kitchens are so small and poorly equipped, or are their kitchens small and poorly equipped because they drink instead of eat? I suspect the latter. We were lucky in that our kitchen, while not American-sized, is spacious and has adequate refrigeration. Our stove top (or hob as they call it) is small but suitable, as is the oven (cooker). Never mind that these appliances are riddled with indecipherable hieroglyphs:

Pretty sure there is picture of a rabbit and maybe a native American inside our freezer door.

I’m sure when I actually need to bake something I will be able to figure it out. We’ve muddled through roasting veggies just fine.

This leaves us with the laundry situation. Every single American that I have met here has called out the U.K. washer/dryer as problematic. Many flats that I saw did not have a clothes dryer at all. Washers tended to be tiny units located in the already tiny kitchen. Our flat has a washer/dryer "in one". Not a stackable combo that is common in U.S. apartments, but rather one unit that claims to magically wash and dry clothing in one contraption. I was hopeful that this machine would defy all naysayers, and prove to be what it promises - the synthesis of two space-consuming appliances into one compact and elegant solution. Not so. The dryer function is pretty pointless. You can only dry about half of the already small load and then your finished clothes are so wrinkled that they look like they’ve just been removed from the bottom of a full hamper.

However, I am growing to like or at least tolerate some aspects of “The Wrinkler” that at first blush appeared to be shortcomings.

• It is tiny.
  
  This seems like a limitation and I’m sure that for larger families it would be, but a smaller washer means that the chore of dealing with the finished product is less daunting. I was a procrastinator when it came to folding and putting away clean clothes, but I don’t mind it so much if the volume is less. The funny thing about this to me is that it would never have occurred to me to intentionally buy a smaller washer or dryer when I lived in the U.S. But really why did we need such a large one? Bigger is not always better.

• The length of the cycle is long. Again, initially this was a frustration. Why does it take 45 minutes to wash such a small amount of clothing? But I’ve noticed that our clothes are extremely clean and apparently the washer is very energy efficient, so there’s that. And it’s not like I’m going to be putting those clothes on any time very soon anyway, because…
• The clothes are wet. No functioning dryer means that, like most everyone else in London apparently, we hang our laundry on racks to dry. I wasn't wild about this idea, but I have to say that I've come around. The biggest downside is that our dried things are not “fluffy”. In fact they could even be called crunchy. This is also a product of the exceptionally hard water in London. I apologize in advance for the scratchy bath towels you will use if you come to stay with us. However, for most items drying on the rack is perfectly fine and I find that if you give things a little shake-out once or twice while they are drying it helps with the crunch factor. In fact, I now look back at all that mechanical clothes-drying I used to do in America and wonder if I was just being manipulated by “big dryer”. In time, your clothes will dry without any assistance. Don’t buy the hype! Racks, man, racks.