26 hours of laundry

A little over a week ago my washing machine started acting wonky and saying it couldn’t drain. We’ll skip all the testing details but it involved me going up 36 flights worth of stairs going back and forth between living area and washing area and running test after test to try and fix it.

I’m not a washer mechanic, so after failing I called an appliance repairman I’d worked with before, the phone was answered immediately and it was evidently him snoring. Attempts to get in touch with him after that and for the next day resulted in straight to voicemail, and then looking up on the internet just to make sure he hadn’t changed his number it looks like a lot of people considered him a scammer and had filed charges. Joy.

Skip the next six places I tried to contact and the two stores I went to in an attempt to just buy a new washer (oh, you have 85 washers on display and they all say in stock and can be picked up in store because you have one on display and that counts as stock? Not helpful) and finally ordered a new machine from Costco. I was pretty ticked at this point because I’d had nearly 8 hours wasted over two days trying to get this done.

Decided to look up probable solutions and the schematics and decided it was the pump (there was a wild herring problem going on involving a clogged manual water outlet hose I’m not getting into that made me think it was not the pump)

But at 3pm yesterday with a $19 part, a YouTube video, and what should have been 20 minutes (but was 40) I took apart a 17 year old washing machine, pulled the pump, replaced it, and hooked everything back up and it started working.

Did the first test load at 3 on a speed wash with no soap (this had been my test load previously, it’d been soaped plenty,) and it worked fine. Put in a load of stuff that if it had to sit on a deck and dry in the sun it could (dryer works, but takes 4 hours to dry sopping wet clothes.) It worked and by 4:01 I was on the first full load in about an hour long leak-check / clothes washing journey.

6:02 it finished, but I was with the kiddos at a rehearsal. 7:40 full load two goes in the laundry, it’s huge which means it’s two dryer loads at least (three this time) and that wash ended at somewhere around 9pm. Now it’s time for some bedding to go in, and that finished after 10. Two larger blankets took another 40 minutes to wash (each took three forty minute dryer runs to dry because they wrap in on themselves and the outside will be dry and the inside will be soaked)

I put another load of clothes in at 11:30 and expected I was going to fall asleep.. didn’t happen moved them to the queue to dry which was now backed up and threw in a load of gym clothes and a couple of things that had gotten missed, threw those in around 1am because I’d been up. By two they were washed. Tried to get to sleep but insomnia fun.

I put in the last load for the dryer about 5am and finally got to sleep.. to 6:30… when I had to get up and get the kids ready. Them out the door resumed the drying train and ran some kid towels I’d missed and some pajamas from the previous night starting at about 8am. 9:30 threw in some shoes, bath towels, one of the kid’s sheets because it had not been changed since we were waiting on washing machine to be fixed.

Ran a couple of more loads and at about noon declared victory thinking “wow, 22 hours of laundry excitement!” I was wrong. After a brief break a laundry basket containing even more clothes was found as well as some of another bed that had to be washed.

I’m saying 26 hours of laundry at this point because that’s what it will be. This is due to a five day washing machine outage and a week that involved mud and an outfit change a day.

That’s what happens when neverending laundry meets five days of expecting the washing machine will be working the next day.