It’s hard to believe, but there is such a thing as men who love doing the laundry. They are part of a unique community known as the ‘Washing Machine Collectors Club’ currently numbers over 3,000 members worldwide. The guys meet several times a year, a few of them coming in from as far away as Madagascar and Australia, for three-day ‘wash-ins’, which is essentially male bonding over dirty laundry.  

Laundry is a rather unusual interest for both men and women, given how boring most people find it. But within this eccentric group, the excitement over a wash-in is usually off the charts. “Everybody’s got their favorite part of the cycle,” Jon Charles, one of the club founders and self-proclaimed ‘washer collector enthusiast’, explains. “We’ve got people who love the wash, they love the rinse or the spin, or the drain. I’m a spin guy. I love the spin.”

“Now we have like 3,000 members from all over the world,” he added. “We get together for washes. We do laundry until like 4:00 in the morning. We do our margaritas and our laundry together. We ‘cheers’ to laundry. We’ll watch the cycles. A lot of us – we’ll sit there and watch the whole cycle go through. All 3,000 of us come in with a story, like ‘I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only person in the world that did this.’”

But it’s not just about the wash cycle with these guys. As the name of the group suggests, club members are obsessed with the washers too, and often compare notes on their private collections. Charles himself has got 59 washing machines, 22 of which are hooked up and running in his basement. “I have a good representation of everything that was made from 1938 to today,” he said. “I take them all apart and I restore them, because I want to know how everything works inside the machine. The laundry is, for me, sort of the icing on the cake.”

“These machines represent ways of doing things in each decade that changed – that we no longer do – and I think it’s something that should be preserved for other people, if we can get them interested. I can’t just go to a cocktail party and say ‘how’s your washer doing?’ They would look at me like I was crazy – but I can get together with these guys, and let my hair down. It’s just so much fun to be able to have a conversation about it.”

“Laundry is a chore for everybody else – but for us it’s play.”

Sources: Fox6, Great Big Story