Adventures in Home Ownership: Major Appliance Woe

The White Boys have left the building. We have brand new siding all around every little bit of the house, every little nook and cranny, places I had never even noticed had siding in the first place. They did a good job, breaking very little (one of the cheap plastic Lawn Buddhas, one of the fancy outdoor electrical outlets on the front porch). One major thing went wrong:  the new windows, which are filled with argon gas and so are blue tinted, meaning the guy is going to have to order clear glass for me. He did not understand this, as the current glass is way more energy efficient. But when I explained to him that, in the winter time, if I do not get a lot—and I mean a LOT—of bright light in my house? I start hunting for my gun (which is a lie, as I don’t have to hunt for it; I know exactly where it is). Well. He understood that right away and said he’d order the new glass that afternoon. And then, when they went to put the windows in, they discovered that he had mis-measured, and they didn’t fit, meaning that they had to saw away at the front of the house in a truly scary fashion and then put in the windows and caulk the hell out of everything, including the new wood on the windowsills, which is now White, omigod (the windowsills are chartreuse; at one point, one of The White Boys said, “Y’all have the most colorful house I’ve ever seen in my life,” and I say, “Thanks!” but am thinking, “Please try not to get any more white on it.”) They finished up on Thursday afternoon and chased down the ice cream truck man and stood out in the yard eating ice cream and popsicles and looking even more like kids from high school working a summer job. And expecting us to believe they’re all in their 20’s. Yeah, right. They work their butts off, though, and do a good job. At least I think so:  guess I’ll find out next time it rains really big, huh?
Nothing new is due to start happening until Monday, when they start the roof. So you’d think our Friday afternoon would be calm, right? We’d be taking a big breath of (smoke-free) air (because of COURSE the White Boys smoked, like every other construction guy we’ve ever had. Well, except maybe two, come to think of it. Given the number we’ve had around here, though, that’s a really tiny percentage). So:  calm, peace, relaxation, right?
Wrong. For one thing, we’re waiting on the Phone Guy to show up. The one guy, remember, came on Monday and hooked up the cable for the new ISP, suddenlink, the only one available to us in this part of town. He said someone would come out Friday to hook up the phone part—Friday being the day the phone number would be ported from clearwire. So I was hanging around the house, waiting for that.
Turns out he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about:  no one came. No one called. Late last night I realized that maybe he’d been not only grouchy and loud and messy and poorly-informed but also just clueless, and I get down and crawl around under the desk and shift a bunch of stuff and unplug the phone from the clearwire phone modem to the suddenlink phone modem and voilá. Worked all along. But I didn’t know that yesterday.
While I was having to hang around the house, it seemed like a good time to wash up some felt:  the postman delivered my big order of wool felt from joggles.com yesterday morning. Happy happy! Two yards of black felt! Plus colors!
If I’d had a camera, I would have (if I remembered. snort.) taken photos of the process. The felt arrives nice and flat, kind of stiff. I toss it in the washing machine on “hot,” and then rinse it twice and toss it in the dryer, where it gets soft and shrinks a BUNCH and—the reason I do it—gets all wrinkly and funky. Then I pick off the balls and fuzz, which takes forfuckingEVER. And then I spray it and iron it into a nice “plated” sheet o’ funky felt, which I love.
The black felt is done, and I put the second load in and go take a shower. When I get out, I hear no washing machine noises. I open the lid and look in, and the machine is full of felt and soapy water, but nothing’s happening. I dick around with the knobs, but nada. I go tell The EGE that I think the washing machine has finally died, and he comes in and dicks around with the knobs and takes off the duct tape and messes around under the lid.
Yeah. I said “duct tape.” We have a washing machine in our house that runs only because of a binder clip and duct tape. Quit shuddering! I know full well that you’re thinking, “All she needs is to move it out on the front porch and line a row of beer cans along the top, with some Nascar magnets on the front.” But there is a Reason for the rigging, OK? Besides the fact that getting the little switch fixed would have cost almost exactly what we paid for the washer in the first place, and it was not a part we could buy at Lowe’s (oh, no:  that would be Empowering the Homeowner to a ridiculous degree!), there was the fact that rigging it this way meant that the washer kept running even when you opened the lid. So I could open the top and pour in more dye or soda ash while the washer was agitating. This was excellent, and I was very happy with my duct-taped washing machine. My rusty, duct-taped washing machine. My dye-spattered, rusty, duct-taped washing machine.
My Washing Machine Formerly Owned by the Joads, pretty much.
[And before you suggest that it was the felt that got in there and clogged up the works, no:  it was the motor:  the washer would still fill, but the motor would not run, either to agitate or to drain.]
I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I’m hard on the washer. Less than half the use is regular, washing-our-laundry use. Most of the time it’s used for felting wool or dyeing stuff or washing cat blankets. We don’t wash the outdoor cat blankets in it—that would be asking too much. We take those to the laundromat and wash them in the Greaser Machines (they actually have signs on them that say that:  “Greaser Machine”).
So the washer is dead. Kaput. AND full of soapy water and wet felt. I get a bucket and haul the felt to the sink and rinse it so it can be dried. And then we get a hose and another bucket and drain the washing machine. Imagine this:  The EGE holds the hose down in the water, and I get down on the floor with my head in the bucket (because the end of the siphon has to be lower, remember) and suck on the end of the hose. This takes many tries, much sucking, many mouthfuls of soapy water, to get going. I’m giggling, thinking, “Gee, it turns out I’m a woman who might well be able to suck a bowling ball through a garden hose after all!” Who knew? Not me, for sure.
Just in case you’re wondering, soapy, felty water is some nasty shit. You might want to make a note of that, just in case. Not a good vintage at all.
The EGE holds the hose, and I carry bucket after bucket out into the yard, dumping the water on the lawn and trumpet vine, as The EGE has just read about the benefits of using grey water (as opposed to black, ie, toilet water) on the lawn.
And then, when it’s all done, I sit down here to look for a new washing machine. This is not as easy as it looks:  I have to have a good, solid, sturdy machine, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to pay a lot of money for one, given what I’m going to do to it. I do not want a digital machine, and I can’t have a front-loading machine:  I have to be able to open the door during the wash cycle. I have to be able to change the time, adding more time if necessary. I’ve been dyeing stuff for a while now, and I’ve got a routine for it that I don’t want to change:  I like changing the colors and the way I add the dye and the scrunching, etc. But I do NOT want to change the basic process, so I do NOT want a machine that will force me to do things its way, rather than my own.
We’ve always had Kenmore washers and dryers. We try to remember how many of each we’ve had in the 33 years we’ve been together. Our first dryer was given to us by my boss at Animal Control when he no longer needed it. After that, we think we’ve bought two. We think we’ve also had two washing machines. We’re not sure, but that sounds right. We think that we’ve had this dryer for over 20 years. And this washer for almost that long. In other words:
--we’ve had pretty good luck with the major appliances, which is why we stick to Kenmore
--neither one of us can remember shit, and we obviously need to hire An Assistant  to come remember stuff for us.
See, here’s how it works here:  The Ever-Gorgeous Earl takes care of pretty much everything:  he pays the mortgage, the insurance, the utilities. He buys the groceries and gas. He does the housework and yard work and the cooking. In short, he takes care of all the necessities of life. And he does it beautifully and without bitching.
Me? I take care of the extras:  the home improvement projects, the contractors, everything having to do with computers and communication and technology and travel. So for the stuff we’ve had done here—the porch, the storage building, the siding, the roofing, that kind of stuff, I make the calls, get the estimates, do the bargaining and cajoling (how we got the entire house re-sided, rather than just 3/4 of it, all with the complete (although hard-won) approval of the insurance company), deal with the contractors and workers, write the checks.
[My first taste of this was years and years ago, when The EGE apparently decided I needed to grow up and sent me out into the world to buy my first brand-new car. He didn’t see it until I drove it home, after much test-driving and haggling.Turned out I have a knack for this.]
So I look online for a new washing machine and find what looks like a good deal. The EGE suggests we should check around, however, so we go to Lowe’s and Home Depot and Best Buy, and then finally we drive to The Dreaded Mall and go into Sears, and I find a young man and open my journal and point to the numbers and say, “I want this combination here, the one you have on sale.”  The washer is regularly $569.99. It’s on sale until Saturday for $484.49. But! with the companion dryer, which is regularly $489.99 and is on sale for $416.49, you can get them, together, for $699.99.
So they would normally cost $1059.98, for a savings of $359.99. Or, if you bought one this morning and then went back this afternoon and bought the other, you’d pay $900.98.
You’re going, “But, Ricë, it’s not really a savings since your dryer didn’t go out.”
Ahh. True. The dryer has not quit working.
Yet.
It does, however, make this reallyreallyreally loud, unhealthy noise that’s been getting progressively louder. In fact, if you’d asked me which would go out first—the duct-taped washer or the incredibly loud dryer, I’d have bet on the dryer. I would have suggested, in fact, that perhaps the only thing holding the dryer together is the gum melted to the inside of the drum.
Gum? One of us chews gum. The other of us, the one who does not chew gum, sometimes does the laundry. This person, who carries kleenex in her pockets, always (well, usually always) thinks to check for kleenex but, not ever carrying gum in her pocket—and what a stupid thing that is, really:  gum in your pocket! I mean, please:  get a special, all-metal, security-sealed, climate-controlled Gum Carrying Case, OK?--does not pat down the clothes for gum.
Hence:  gum melted to the inside of the dryer. Probably the only thing that’s kept it going for over 20 years. I think it neutralized the rust. Lord, the things that dryer has seen! So many, many experiments. Plus the front of has black marks all over from when I was running and would kick off my running shoes every morning. They’d hit the front of the dryer and leave black marks, and somehow I must have looked at those marks as some sort of Badge of Accomplishment that spoke to me of all those miles I’d run, all the sweat and work, the pain and joy.
Either that or I was just too fucking lazy to clean them off. Whichever.
I could have gotten the least expensive Kenmore washer for $328 , and then, sometime within the next year, spent $379.99 on the cheapest dryer. That would have been $707.99. Doing it this way, I would pay less than that AND get significantly better (ie, more choices in water level, rinse cycle, etc.) appliances, all WITHOUT having to deal with digital stuff, front-load stuff—any of the stuff I didn’t want.
So:  some minimal snazziness, and a big savings. What’s not to love?
Well, paying the delivery fee, and the haul-away fee, and the delivery-on-Saturday fee, which is the next available day they can deliver it after it arrives in the warehouse. Sounds ever-so-slightly-like a scam, doesn’t it? But at this stage of my life, I’m not up to trying to load a dead washing machine into the back of the Expedition and haul it to the dump, you know? Been there, done that. There was a time when we did all this ourselves:  when we moved into this house, we moved the washer and dryer, the furniture, the refrigerator—everything—by ourselves. Oh, wait:  I think I finally had a temper tantrum at the end and called one of The EGE’s brothers for help in getting the refrigerator up the steps, since I had bronchitis (and, unbeknownst to me at the time, severe anemia) and finally had Just Had Enough. Oh, the early days! Even with my lousy memory, I can remember all the stuff we did ourselves when we were young and had little money and lots of energy and were so goofy in love that it actually seemed fun to sit outside in the heat, with him working on the motor of the Volkswagen while I read the instructions from a book on VW repair I’d checked out of the library. Remember that? You thought he was sexy when he was out there in his ratty old sweatshirt digging up the sewer line. Or you once tried to impress him by buying and installing a backflow valve on that same sewer line while he was at work and then tried in vain to find a way to get him to notice it without your actually having to drag him outside and point it out to him. I mean, really:  doesn't everyone just automatically go out and check their backflow valves after a day teaching 7th graders about personal hygiene?
I know why the washing machine went out:  it heard me in here talking about buying a new camera. It heard that and thought, “Huh. She can afford to buy a new camera, can she? I’ll show her who’s boss.”
I took The EGE out on the front porch and said, “Shhhhh. Don’t let the refrigerator hear, but. . . .” Because this was A Planned Expense:  I knew that, sooner or later, these things were going to die, and so there had to be enough money to replace them. But if the refrigerator heard? And told the hot water heater and the stove? Then we’d be in trouble. You know how they are:  they band together and mutiny, cackling happily as you scramble around, trying to find more binder clips and that roll of duct tape.