["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 7, 2026] 2026
Last week I wrote about our first week of a two-year work assignment in Stockholm where we found ourselves completely stymied by both our stove and the apartment's bedding. But the real challenges were to come with laundry.
Like most Stockholm apartment buildings, ours had a laundry room in the basement. The important concept was that one doesn't just show up in the laundry room and start stuffing one's clothes into a machine. Unlike most U.S. apartment laundry rooms, which tend to be free-for-alls, the ever-organized Swedes have this down to their usual egalitarian science: you sign up for laundry time. During that time, the laundry room is yours, and yours alone, and should someone be so callous and depraved to dare to do their laundry in someone else's time slot, the building's residents are legally entitled to take him (and it would be a him) out to the woods and feed him to the bears. Well, maybe not legally entitled, but the polis would not only look the other way, but would probably be out rounding up the bears.
So rigid was the laundry system when we were there that we were advised that "it's my laundry time" was a nationally-accepted excuse to get out of pretty much anything.
But we were fortunate - or so we thought - that our apartment came with small (very small) stackable washer and dryer units. Would that we could make any sense of them at all.
The directions on the laundry soap box said that for a "three to five kilogram load" (um, okay) to put in sixty milliliters of detergent. We had no clue how much sixty milliliters was. A cup? Half a cup? Half the box? Fortunately I'd brought a dual American-metric measuring cup from San Diego which I d intended for cooking. Turns out sixty milliliters is only about a quarter of a cup, which I duly measured out and poured in. You definitely don't want to dare a front-loading machine.
Our Oko-Lavamat 62600 must have been the Ferrari of mini-machines. On the far left side was a dial whose options were: Blötläggn, Tömning, Förtvätt, Fläckar, Huvudtvätt, Snabbtvätt, Sköljning, Mjuksköljn, and Centrifug (must be spin?)
The next set of controls we figured had to be the temperature setting, as I knew kallt meant cold. We set it to 70 (Farenheit? Celsius?)
The third set of controls were labeled: Vittvätt, Kulortvätt (must be something about colored and white (vitt) stuff) but which?), Strykfritt, Fintvätt (maybe fine washables?) and Ylle (no clue whatever)
The FOURTH set of controls said: 1200, 1000, 700, 400, Sköljstopp.
And (sob!) the last set is labeled: 12h, 8h, 4h, 2h. Surely we can t be talking HOURS?
And finally a Till/Fran button which must (I hoped) be On/Off?
My Swedish dictionary, which seemed to be missing half the words in the Swedish language, was no help. I randomly selected Huvudtvätt, pushed the Till/Fran and lo and behold, it began filling with water.
I should mention that we lived in Sweden in 2005 and 2006 when translation software was in its infancy. Now, of course, I could probably just take a photo of all these options and submit it to Chatgpt, which would not only translate and explain all the options, but recommend a setting. Maybe even fold the clothes afterwards.
But if I thought the washer was a challenge, it was the dryer that totally undid us. While the washer had tons of word options, the dryer had almost no words on it at all, just lots of symbols. The first set was divided into two sections the first of which looks like a flower? Underneath it was a series of little rectangles notched in different ways with numbers next to them, then one that looked like an iron and another that looks like a teardrop. Next to it is a symbol of what? A water pitcher? Some more little notched rectangles were under that symbol too. The next panel has a Start button (oh, thank you! thank you!) but next to it were three more buttons with symbols: A sun setting behind clouds. A letter R. A bell (or maybe it's a nose?). This machine should be a graduate school entrance exam. Of course, I wouldn't get in.
Knowing that if all else failed, I could do timed dry, I plunked the laundry into the dryer and opted for the flower and one of the rectangles and hit Start. It started right up, but I noticed a short time later that it had stopped and the laundry was still wet.
No matter how many times I ran the dryer on any settings, the clothes remained soaking wet and about 500 degrees. Seriously, you could sustain serious burns just touching your own laundry. I longed for Permanent Press but all I could make my dryer do was timed fry.
I was finally able to accost a woman in our building to help me decode my dryer. I should note that our Swedish neighbors in the building were initially wary of us, Americans having a reputation of showing up at your door with muffins and intruding on your personal space. She kept asking me if I was emptying the "reservoir." What reservoir? It turns out that the dryer could not be vented on the exterior because of its location in the apartment and hence had a small water tank which collected water from one's apparel as it dried it. But once it was full, nothing was going to dry any further until you emptied it. Which, by the way, you had to do a LOT. You couldn't just go out to lunch and leave the thing or you'd come back to wet radioactive socks.
Thor forbid there should be any label on the machine indicating it was concealing a water tank inside the front panel. Accessing this reservoir was reminiscent of the hidden compartments of Nancy Drew books of my youth; you just had to know it was there. And when you pressed the magic (invisible) spot, voilà, the door popped open and you could remove the water tank and empty it in the sink.
But for the first week, we were drying all our clothes on a bunk bed ladder in our apartment and trying to avoid third degree burns.
Mastering the laundry facilities in our apartment was a huge boon to our quality of life. But we had no idea how much more we still had to learn.
Stay tuned for Sweden Stories Part 3 next week.
The hidden reservoir was finally discovered
But you had to empty it A LOT
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