washroom
A laundry room is a room that is used for laundry cleaning . Up until the 1970s, it was common in Germany to include laundry rooms in the basements of new buildings; today, communal laundry rooms are still common in Switzerland.
Before the advent of private laundry rooms there were public wash houses , as outbuildings ( laundry hut , bair.-Austrian. Waschkuchl ). Today, separate washrooms in houses are rarely found.
Facility
An essential part of a laundry room was a brick oven with a walled-in tub (the so-called wash kettle ) in which the wash water was heated. This included the firing system required for this, which was operated with coal and / or wood, more rarely gas, sometimes there were also masonry or concrete basins in which the laundry could be soaked or rinsed in clear water. A laundry room usually had a water drain on the floor so that excess water could drain away. Accordingly, the floor had to be moisture-proof, usually it consisted of cement screed or was covered with tiles, and wooden gratings lying on the floor (to prevent slipping) were sometimes used. The walls of the laundry room were sometimes also tiled in the lower part or painted with oil paint to protect them against splashing water. Because of the dampness, laundry rooms in residential buildings were mostly set up in the basement, as the wooden beam ceilings on the upper floors that used to be common would have been damaged by seeping in water and condensation. In the vicinity of the laundry room or in the laundry room itself, laundry drying facilities (stretched lines) were provided, so where the laundry room was in the basement it often had an exit to the garden and drying area. With the increased emergence of the first electrically operated washing machines such as the first, not yet fully automatic washing machines or spin dryers , and after the Second World War, corresponding power connections became common in the laundry rooms.
The washing procedure in the laundry room required other utensils such as bleuel (wooden hand paddles) or around half a meter long wooden laundry tongs with which the often boiling hot laundry could be pulled out of the tub, soft soap , brushes with which the laundry was scrubbed clean, a washboard to mechanically clean particularly dirty textiles and various zinc tubs or wooden tubs for washing the textiles. With appropriate wooden trestles as a base, the tubs with washing water could be brought to a comfortable working height. Since the heating of the washing water took a long time, the duration of a total wash was one day. If several families had to share a laundry room, the days of the week have been set at which a particular family Waschtag had.
The strong development of steam that arose when the textiles were cooked was remarkable. A laundry room therefore had to have a window that could be opened. Colloquially, the laundry room is therefore used as a synonym for fog . Laundry rooms were also used as summer kitchens, especially in rural areas, and fodder was sometimes prepared in them for the cattle. Since the washing kettle made it possible to heat larger amounts of water and the room was heated in the process, laundry rooms were also used for bathing before bathrooms became common in apartments. Widely used were made of galvanized sheet metal people bathtubs that could be filled with water from the wash boiler. Emptied into the floor drain of the laundry room, they could be placed upright in a corner.
Today, the term laundry room (or laundry room) is often used to refer to rooms that are intended for the installation of washing machines and / or tumble dryers . They are mainly found in apartment buildings and, like classic laundry rooms, usually have a drain in the floor so that water can run off in the event of a defect or certain maintenance work on the washing machines; Often there are also masonry bases on which the washing machines are placed at a convenient height. In many cases there are water and electricity connections for washing machines, the consumption of which is recorded by the meters for individual apartments in the house, so that each tenant can use a parking space belonging to his apartment for the washing machine and the energy consumption is billed correctly. In some houses tenants are also provided with coin-operated washing machines and tumble dryers in the laundry room.
Wash houses
Germany
The wash house , even washing hut stands in the village, as well as the pre-industrial urban residential structure on or in a main square, and is a public building. Here, too, there were rules governing the washing day in order to save or share heating material - unless cold washing was carried out in summer and winter. In addition, there are also agricultural outbuildings of the traditional courtyard shape , which - like all other heatable facilities except for the cooking area - are separated for fire protection reasons. Most laundry, are oven , bath house and the historic Brechlbad the flat extraction combined in a common building. But wash houses were also built in an urban context, for example for the residents of one or more apartment buildings ; the most recent examples date from the 1950s and 60s, i.e. up to the general spread of the washing machine.
Wash house from the early 20th century in Oberwürzbach
Interior of the wash house in Oberwürzbach, renovated with modern materials
Spin dryer in the wash house from the 1960s in Klausen / Remscheid
Washing stairs on the Glan near Dietschweiler Mühle (Pfalz)
Wash barge in Mainz on the Rhine around 1933
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France
Wash house on the Fosse Dionne in Tonnerre (France)
Wash house on the Lauter in Altenstadt near Weissenburg ( Alsace )
Italy
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Spain
Wash house in the village of Lopidana near Vitoria-Gasteiz , Spanish Basque Country
Wash house in the village of Lopidana near Vitoria-Gasteiz , Spanish Basque Country (interior view)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Example: Oven and washing hut, Alpbach (Tyrol). In: From home and yard. Stübing open-air museum, accessed on April 12, 2008 .