By JUDD WEIL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Husband and wife duo, Robert and Jill Garrett, are getting closer to opening the Busy Bee Laundromat in Hutchinson. The Busy Bee Laundromat is supposed to provide Hutchinson residents living around 4th Street a convenient place to do laundry.
The idea for the laundromat came when tenants in the apartments the couple own requested laundry facilities.
“We have a couple of small apartment units, and they did not have laundry facilities,” said Garrett. “We started working towards that.”
While the Garretts worked to provide their tenants with laundry facilities, L & D Speed Queen Laundry, where the tenants were doing their laundry as the next most convenient place, shut down.
“We checked with the laundry to see what was going on and the owners had decided they were no longer going to operate it, so we got into a discussion with them about getting it reopened,” Garrett said. “We figured if our tenants needed it, then other people would need it, too.”
After doing research on laundromats, the Garretts discovered in that in this part of Kansas, there were a lot of outdated, older laundromats. With that in mind, they set out to make a appealing and updated laundromat for their tenants and their community.
They even looked at newer laundromats around Kansas to gauge what they would like and what would provide the best service.
“We saw and liked what they looked like, the feel of being inside them, and the comfort of going to them knowing you could put your laundry in a machine, and it is going to be clean,” Garrett said. “You're going to be safe there and stuff is going to work and you're going to be in and out and it's going to be a pleasant experience. We wanted that for Hutchinson.”
Busy Bee Laundromat will host 20 washers and dryers for customers to use. Once they all get here that is.
“We are facing the same challenges as the rest of America at the time where we are waiting until the machines arrive and we don't get a specific set date as to when that is,” Garrett said. “We have the dryers, and we were told the dryers would be here in the middle of April, but they showed up at the first part of April, so that was great.”
“We're being told the washers should be in sometime in May. We're hoping, again, that happens earlier.”
To prepare for opening, Busy Bee Laundromat has been hard at work not just replacing the outdated washers and dryers, some from the 1980s, but also updating the building itself.
The Garretts have updated the plumbing, the electrical system, and the lights. They are still working on the heating and air conditioning.
Additionally, they are renovating the building for office spaces for employees. Robert Garrett said they intend to employ four people in a rotation.
Also being added to the laundromat will be a kids area to keep children entertained, complete with toys and a little library, while parents work on cleaning clothes.
When it opens, Busy Bee Laundromat will not only give people a place to wash clothes, but also a sweet treat. The Garretts will be selling honey at the laundromat.
“We raise honey bees at our home and so we have honey for sale over the last five to six years,” Robert Garrett, co-owner of Busy Bee Laundromat, said. “When we got this place, we decided to kind of tie that in.”
The Garretts started keeping bees in 2017 to work with the orchard they have at their home.
“When you have bees, you end up with honey, and you end up figuring out how you're going to distribute that,” Garrett said. “We started a little honey business.”
Following the purchase of their building, the Garretts decided to not just sell the honey at the laundromat but theme it properly by naming it the Busy Bee Laundromat.
The Busy Bee Laundromat is anticipated to open on 628 E. 4 St. in mid to late May.
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