I HATE Laundry

Seriously. Laundry may just be the bane of my existence. It never ends. You have to wash it, dry it, fold it (usually more than once) and put it away. And no matter how many loads you do, something is always still dirty. And then you have to mess with a washer and dryer. Our dryer hasn't been drying well for awhile, we were pretty sure some thermostat was messed up or something.

Then, Monday night, it died. Well, stopped heating. With two wet loads of laundry. We didn't figure it out until Tuesday when I woke up and the clothes were still wet. So I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what could be wrong, and what it would take to fix it. I narrowed it down to four things, and needed a multimeter to test them. Then I started looking up parts. Anywhere from 30-80 bucks per part. Then I decided to find out how old the dryer really was, I was thinking about 6 years. Uh, try 16.

Ben got home and we talked and we thought maybe we'd just upgrade, and sell the dryer As-Is, and not hassle with fixing it. We also figured we could find a good deal on KSL and pick it up the next day. We started looking and found a couple. There was one that was a little nicer, and a fairly good deal, not fantastic, but pretty good deal. So I called the lady up. She spoke a lot better Spanish than English, and I got a little stressed trying to talk to her. She was able to tell me enough about the dryer that I figured it probably wasn't stolen, and she actually had a dryer in her possession. The pictures were pretty standard and it looked to be in good condition. She said it worked good, and that it was her brother's, and he moved to an apartment with gas hookups instead of electric, and they had a truck so they were selling it for him so they could deliver. Great. They said they could bring it over the next morning. Alright. I said I'd text her my address. About 10 minutes later, she called back and said her husband could bring it by in about an hour, because she needed to go to the hospital. Well, I guess if that's what you need to do, I thought they might need the cash to pay, and we do live about 2 blocks from the hospital.

I got off the phone, and I was starting to get really stressed out. I thought it was just from trying to talk to this lady. Seriously, I nearly had a panic attack trying to order at Cafe Rio the other day, and I have no idea what ended up on my burrito. And spending money. I don't like to do that either. I said maybe we should wait, just get something a little cheaper. Ben said he wanted to get something nice. 

So the guy shows up with his little girl about an hour later. He helps get the dryer up our 3 flights of stairs. We plug it in and turn it on. It works! It's heating, it looks clean and in good shape, no weird noises. So we pay the guy. Before he leaves he offers to take our old dryer for us, since it's not working. I say no thanks, we'll take care of it ourselves. He says he has a friend who could use it. No thanks. Are we sure, it'd be no hassle for him. Uh, no, we got it. Just as I'm starting to go "What's going on here?" he's gone in a flash. Maybe his friend just really needs a dryer?

Well, let's dry these clothes! So we put a load in. And as soon as we start it up it starts making a terrible clunking noise. WHAT? It wasn't making that noise a minute ago. We start looking closer. Can't see anything. Start researching online. Find some information that it could just need to heat up if it's been in storage for awhile. The clunking's not going away. The rest of the info points to not good news. So I pull the clothes out. What is that little shiny thing way in the back of the drum? Go to pull it out, it's stuck. IS THAT TAPE? BEN!!!! He looks, more closely. Yep, that tape, and a lot more of it on the underside of the drum. THE DRUM IS SPLIT IN HALF! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The drum of the dryer is pretty much the only non-replaceable part of a dryer (well, at least I'm not spending $300 to fix a dryer). The guy did a shoddy patch job, and it held long enough to test the dryer without clothes in it. Obviously, they never answered their phone again.

Then I Googled their phone number and returned tons of archived KSL ads. They do it once a week. I know, without a doubt, if we'd given them our old dryer we would see it on KSL within the next month. All right. Now what? Weld it? No, according to all the other people with broken Maytag drums online, welding it makes it worse, even when professionally done. Ooo, what if the drum of our old dryer will fit? We measure, bingo! Same size. So we take both dryers completely apart and switch the drums. It's working!  What a quarter inch short? Awesome. Well, let's see if we can epoxy the drum back together. Ben spends all night on that.

I took apart our other dryer and started testing all the thermostats/heating element/fuses. Heating element- there's no way that thing works, it's cracked and charred looking. Oh, it does work. Seriously? Thermostats- they both work. Fuses- aha, I found it. Both fuses out. Ok, well how much is this going to cost? $40....what, they can't get it to me until next week? Maybe Amazon sells dryer parts, even though they didn't come up on Google. Type the part numbers into Google. There it is. $22, including overnight shipping. Bang head against wall. Ben says the epoxy looks like it's going to work, so we'll have a new dryer! No, we won't, I HATE that dryer and don't want it in my house. If you fix it, we are selling it. Oh, and there's a heating element on Amazon for $20. We could just replace that too, and we'd have a brand new dryer that would probably last us another 16 years. We're up until 4 a.m. messing with all this stuff, because we have two totally torn apart dryers in our kitchen, which is a bad idea with two kids.

Next day: the epoxy is dry. The parts are ordered. Stick the drum back in. Thud thud, thud thud, thud thud. Crap. Start calling places that buy broken appliances. They all say the same thing: take it to the junkyard. No one wants a dryer with a broken drum. We pull out all the parts that we could possibly sell, and put the rest in the scrap heap at our apartments. We totally clean out our dryer and reassemble, minus a couple fuses and a thermostat. It's 3:30 in the afternoon. What a waste.

Sometimes I guess you get to live and learn. Here are some things that I learned:

1.   I will never buy a Maytag dryer/washing machine. They are junk.
2.   If I ever buy a used dryer again, whoever I buy it from will think I am crazy, because I'm going to insist on actually doing a load of laundry in it, and inspect every square inch of that thing.
3.   Amazon is the place to order appliance parts.
4.   I am a dryer repair expert. It's not that hard, and it's cheap. If your dryer ever breaks down, call me.
5.   That panicky-stressed out feeling I get may just be me freaking out, or it may be a warning. I should probably pay closer attention. I can't say I've gotten one of those warnings before, so it's probably good that I figured it out now, before my kids get older.
6.   Roughly 2% of the population are "unconditional nonreciprocators." Read more about that here. (It will even teach you how to run your own con, if you've decided to take up that kind of business.) That said, 98% of the population are generally decent human beings. That's why all my friends have had good experiences buying washers/dryers on KSL, and it's the first thing they mention when I start telling this story by saying, "So my dryer broke."
7.   Not all people who get conned are idiots. Every person who gets conned will feel like an idiot. You can always create a million scenarios where you didn't fall for it, but the fact that you did probably just means you've not been completely jaded. Now, after reading my story, if you still think I'm a idiot and I should have seen that coming- well, it either means you've already been conned, so you are always on the lookout for those unconditional nonreciprocators, OR you've never been conned and think that only stupid people fall for that. I hope you never figure out anything different.

Ding-dong. Oh, that's my dryer parts, I have to go fix my dryer now.