The Service Area

Most house listings will advertise having an área de serviço (service area) because, naturally, your maid needs a place to work.  I mean that in a completely respectful way.  We have a maid and I adore, appreciate and respect her totally.  But this really is her area.  I know where the broom is, and I wash some laundry, but I don't like to mess with her space.

Notice the utility sink is made of granite.  It seemed strange to me when we first arrived that all the utility sinks we saw were made of granite.  In the US granite is a luxury item.  Here it is a standard building material. 

The washing machine.....my beautiful 25+ year old Brastemp.  I actually love this machine.  At our first house we had a cheap plastic piece of garbage that took almost 2 hours to wash a (small) load.  This Brastemp is a mean machine.  It was made before companies considered "cost reduction."  She's tough.  She's big.  She can handle a load.  And she can do it in about 35 minutes!  That's important when you have 5 people to wash for, and your counting on the sunniest part of the day for drying!  Well, there's the little thing about how it keeps breaking.....the spin cycle keeps failing.  I refuse to call the home owner because I'm afraid he'll replace the machine with previously mentioned cheap plastic piece of garbage, and lucky for me I have an engineer/repair man on hand.  He's fixed it for me more than a few times.  I think he's really on to something this time though.  When he used toothpicks to hold the brittle wiring in place, it has held for some 14 loads of laundry.  Ya hoo! DaddyH does it again!

Can you see the flip flops drying on the washer?  Regular shoe washing is an important part of Brazilian culture.  Unfortunately, until we had a maid, my kids must have had the dirtiest shoes at school, because I didn't know shoe washing was a social norm.

Next to the washer you can catch a glimpse of our tiny dryer.  It's not vented, there is no way to attach it to a vent to outlet the hot, humid air.  Many people we talked to just let the hot, linty air blow around the laundry room.  DaddyH brought back a dryer exhaust hose from the US and when we dry, we open the window and shove it out.  Pretty high tech.

That bit in the last post about how no one has built in closets, I forgot about this wall of storage.  It's awesome and FULL!  Half of it is cleaning supplies and the rest is pretty much craft and homeschool things.

 There is also this little area for shoe storage.  After they are all clean, you  need to collect them somewhere!