First Washer/Dryer Hook-ups

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yogitunes

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Pierre's great thread on first machines that started it all for us got me thinking....

Where was the location and setup for your parents first Automatic washer/dryer....
many homes did not have locations or hookups for these already, and had to be placed, plumbed, and electrical connections......

1964 Ours was in the kitchen......we only had a washer, no dryer, Dad tapped into the water lines under the sink, and it drained into the wall mounted sink....for years....1981 the kitchen sink was replaced and moved to the other end of the wall, allowing the washer to have its own connections and drain pipe, and also allowed space for the dryer and vent out the back wall...I actually missed seeing the water drain out the hose, and gurgle down the drain...
 
My Mom's first automatic washer ('55 Westinghouse) was in the basement of our old house; it was built in 1903. When I was two, we moved a couple blocks to the house I've been renovating. The washer went in the corner of a basement room, and was joined in about '62 or so by a Westinghouse dryer. I remember a small fuse box had to be added for it, and a vent installed.
 
thanks me from what i can remember as a kid the very first washer dryer set that was hook up was this set but it was hook up in the basement of the very first house that my parents bought in alymer canada then it was hook up in the bathroom in the second house that i lived in as a kid it was this inglis whirlpool superb washer dryer set to be able to buy and use this set in my actual home in other word my dream vintage set lol

pierreandreply4++3-27-2011-11-18-24.jpg
 
The house we first lived in that had its own washer & dryer had 'em Side-by-Side w/ a standpipe behind the washer & all the water & electric hook-ups (& maybe a gas hook-up; the dryer was electric, though) behind the appliances... This laundry room was probably a "pass-through" room to get to & from the garage to/from the kitchen & main part of the house... There were stairs leading down to the garage on a lower-level below-ground, as the house didn't have a "true basement" and was built on a hill (which I was warned not to roll off of, while eating my M&M's out of a red plastic bowl in front of the house, while Andy Williams & The Sandpipers played, probably from the house next door...)

Funny how the only bathroom was through the kitchen while I "owned" the upstairs: My bedroom & a play room across from it, but surprisingly NO BATH...

Mom & Dad slept in the bedroom that was downstairs & my younger sis (BABY sis) might have had her crib there, too...

WEIRD HOUSE! No wonder we moved...

Fast-forward to the house I did my growing up in: the washer & dryer are in an un-finished basement laundry room, in an L-Shape, adjacent to one-another... There's a double-tub that the washer drains into (and maybe the "unused" one could be for "SUDS SAVING"?) and the plumbing runs via over-head pipes behind the washer which gets plugged into an outlet on the wall behind it (some of the houses on our block--early 1950's ones like ours--have a hanging cord to plug the washers into, but most have been converted to wall outlets, more modern & safer) while the dryer has a 220V plug running off of the fuse box, w/ an unused,--unconnected even--, gas line running behind it...

While years later in my OWN house, the washer & dryer are next to each other in another unfinished basement laundry room & the washer drains into a single tub, while on the wall along-side the dryer is a 220V plug for an electric dryer, but we have gas w/ the hook-up behind it & both the washer & dryer share the same plug! Plumbing for the washer runs via pipes over-head...

The apt. we lived in before had its own laundry/utility room similar to the "first laundry room" arrangement, above...

Thank you very much for this & OTHER GREAT TOPICS!

Now who here has (or has HAD) a FINISHED laundry room???? (which I refer to--if you've seen some of those finished laundry rooms in some of those home remodeling books I have--as a "SUPER-DUPER LAUNDRY ROOM") I wish I did...!

-- Dave
 
Cool question Martin

When my Mom got her 1961 Kenmore, they lived in Cincinnati in a two story building that was divided into four apartments. This building had a full basement underneath. The basement was considered a common area, and had storage, clothes lines, etc. for each resident to use. There were apparently four washers and dryers connected down there which were not divided privately. Would that not have been COOL to not only see your Mom's washer but those of three others too? I would have loved to see that, but I was six months old when we moved. Apparently though one of the other residents had a Lady K set.

The first installation that I remember was in our first house in Columbus, which was in the basement. That's where I learned the fascination of washer and dryer. My bike, roller skates and toys were down there too so I had many reasons to be in the basement. Our next house was in Rochester, Michigan where we moved in December 1967. New build construction, so it had a laundry room behind the garage, which was in front of our den. It was there that I remember the 1961 70 the most. That house did not have a rough-in box (as we call them here in the south) but it had a laundry sink, and the water lines for the faucet were interrupted to have valves for the hot and cold washer lines. The washer drained into the sink, and I smiled when you mentioned the gurgle of the drain water, as I remember that well. This is where we would clean the 61's lint filter, and where I saw our 74's self cleaning lint filter burp up its lint cache each drain period.

Upon our move to Denver, the house there had a sink too in the laundry room, but a standpipe in the wall and separate hot can cold tops about a foot from the floor. I used to move the drain hose to the sink, away from the quiet standpipe, but my folks would hear the splashing and come running, so eventually it was frowned upon A LOT to mess with it. Looking back, if I lived there now I could fit three belt-drives into that laundry room and still have a dryer in there! Too fun....

Gordon
 
My parents first house was one of those post-WWII kind of starter houses somewhere between April & June of 1948, around the time my oldest sister was born-3 br, 1 ba, livng room dining room.  One of the "bedrooms" (which was mine) was paneled so it was supposed to be a "den" too (our neighbors had a similar configuration).  My bedroom had the only interior access door to the garage, otherwise garage access was out the back, through the screened-in porch to the back yard/driveway/garage door.  (That screened porch was enclosed in about 1954 or 1955 to become the den as that's how I only knew it.  Anyway, the washer & dryer connections were in the garage on the opposite wall (gee how convenient for me to crawl or walk out to the garge to the Bendix as a baby/toddler from my own bedroom).  Mind you, I didn't start walking until, what I've understood, to be about 18 to 20 m0onths of age.  It seems to me about the time I went vertical is about the time the Bendix was replaced with the GE lol.  I'm only assuming the water/drain/gas connections were provided in the garage as part of the construction.    I'll be seeing my dad for his 90th b-day celebration in a few weeks so I'll see if he remembers that fine-tune point or not. 
 
<span style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino; font-size: medium;">My parents house was built in 1922, and they bought it in 1967.  The basement has a concrete double laundry sink with space on each end for the washer and dryer.  To vent the dryer, Dad took out one of the panes of glass in the window above the sink, and ran the pipe through a piece of plywood to the outside.  The basement also had clotheslines running the length of it to save on dryer usage.  When my parents bought the house it only had a 60amp service, so the dryer and furnace each had their own circuit, and the rest of the house ran on the other 2.  The laundry sink came in very handy with my Mom having nothing but suds-saver machines.  Almost 3 years ago now they decided to remodel 1/2 of their enclosed front porch area into a 1st floor laundry room.  Mom had her Maytag Dependable Care set moved from the basement to the laundry room rather than buy a completely new set.</span>
 
My parents' first house had the laundry connections in the garage, which was pretty typical for suburban ranch houses in this area in the '50s and '60s. There were hot and cold taps and a standpipe for the washer, the location of which was only a few feet away from the water heater, which was in the corner. So the washer always had hot water. There was an outlet high on the wall for the washer and the 220V outlet (and back then, it was 220V, not 230V) for the dryer was down near the floor. The house was built on a crawl space but the garage was on a slab; it was two steps down from the kitchen floor through the door to the garage floor. The plumbing came out of the crawl space through the wall down low, and was all exposed within the garage. In cold weather my dad ran a portable 220V electric heater in the garage to keep the washer and the plumbing from freezing; there was an outlet wired for that.

There was no provision for venting the dryer. You just let it blow into the garage. Dealers sold a deflector which was attached to the back of the dryer at the vent exit to make the air blow upward or sideways. Every so often you had to pull the dryer out from the wall and clean all the lint up.
 
My parents first house had a laundry room. They bought a house that was built in 1955. My Grandparents house had the washing machine on the back porch,no dryer,and 4 rows of clothes lines in the back yard. That house was built with square nails,late 1800's?

Jim
 
Great thread idea Yogi!

Why here it is in late 1963 or early 1964, that's me right in the kitchen of our apartment on my grandmothers lap with my mom's relatively new 1962 BOL Kenmore  washer in the background.

unimatic1140++3-27-2011-17-24-6.jpg
 
Robert, you were cute and adoreable even all the way back then!!!  What a future stud!!  Is that your mom in the background?  I dodn't think that Kenmore model changed essentially for almost 20 years!!
 
Awww, thanks Bob :-), yes that's my mom in the background.  We had that washer until the end of 1968 when my parents got tired of having it fixed.  We bought a new Kenmore at an end of year clearance sale at Sears.
 
Thank you Chris :-) Darrel I was five at the time and I told them they should buy a Frigidaire like grandma's because it so much more fun.  I remember my Dad saying no because washers at Sears were so much less expensive there and that "we weren't made of money" lol. I do remember the machine on clearance being up on a carpeted pedestal at the stand-alone Sears store in New Brunswick, NJ.
 
My parents had a separate section of the "finished basement" that was unfinished. And that's where the washer & dryer were placed. There was a 2 tub concrete tub next to the washer that was used with the suds saver on the washer. But I think my mom only used it a few times, the sussaver option that is.
 
My parents bougth their first home a year after I was born. The utility room (with a washer only hookup) was just off the kitchen. We dried our clothes on the line in the back yard. More than a decade later, I was in charge of the weekly wash and begged my parents for a clothes dryer. My father (the mechanic that he was) ran a vent and a gas line in the garage, and that's where our frog-eye Kenmore dryer ($50 bucks!) went. With no direct door from the house to the garage, I had to take the wash through the front porch and open the garage to dry the clothes. It was still an improvement over hanging the clothes to dry.
Today, my condo has a washer/dryer hookup in the kitchen. Things sure have changed.
 
my grandmother washer dryer hookup

hello to all aw members here is a pic of my grandmother washer dryer hookup in the house she lives in when it was originaly built what is her bathroom today was where her washer no dryer was hook up and with 7 kids she had to line dry her clothes then a few years later she made some changes in her house and her washer dryer hookup was in her basement she must of bought a dryer by the time this was done and this is where her washer and dryer is hook up and still is today.

pierreandreply4++3-27-2011-19-03-36.jpg
 

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