Q: What shouldn't your clothes smell like out of the dryer?

A: A campfire.

After doing our first load of laundry about a week after moving in for good, I folded our new white towels and washcloths and put them away in the linen closet upstairs. The next morning, after showering for the day, I noticed that the towel, yes the ones I had just washed and folded, smelled like fire. I thought it was weird but didn't think much of it since we were using unusual laundry soap... I thought it just boiled down to the fact that the new house was weird and the new soap wasn't great. These thoughts, foolish foolish thoughts, are why you have parents who listen to your story and make faces at your weird smelling towels and then immediately tell you to STOP using the dryer before you have a dryer fire. What a "welcome to homeownership", right?

Cleaning out the dryer vent wasn't hard, it's wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't hard. After detaching the pipe, which was barely attached to begin with, I took all the pieces apart and cleaned them until they sparkled (that's a bit of an exaggeration ;))

As you can see the duct tape came right off and it was crunchy... not really doing it's job anymore. You can also see the lint that is just hanging out of the end... it was lovely. Let me take a second to say that I am not weird about dirt and grime and I will clean whatever is necessary but for some reason this bothered me because it was someone ELSES dirt and grime. Who knows what the logic is there but I can say that this was not my favorite house chore thus far.

 

I mean, really, would you want to stick your arm into that?

After cleaning the (nearly) 8ft pipe I had a pile of gunk and a clean, smoke smell free, dryer vent. It was hard to get every remnant of dust away but all in all, they were in much better shape after a bit of effort.

Looks nice, right? 

 

All my scraps - lots also ended up in the garbage.

So after the cleaning, Rob and I continued to put the pipe back together with fresh duct tape so it was ready to reinstall. Seemingly simple as the task was, it ended up being a little harder than expected. There are pipes in the ceiling that make it hard to attach the pipe back at the top near the outlet to outside. We had to move the washer and dryer to accomplish this reattachment which would be no biggie but our washer and dryer sit on a four inch pedestal which makes the "scooching" a little harder than usual.We got everything put back together after just about 45 minutes of wrangling the pipe to forcing it to submit to our will (HAHA).

So we accomplished this simple homeowner task without too much hassle and we felt pretty proud! We're still new to this so even the little things are big accomplishments to us ;)

The end? nope. 

The next day I decided to do a load of laundry to re-wash those ugly smelling towels. About 25 minutes into the wash cycle I went back into the laundry room for something... good thing I did. There was about three inches of water swirling around the drain on the cement floor and the carpet was "squishy" with water about four feet into the finished part of the basement. Oh my dear... I think I just stood there for about 20 seconds before I computed that turning off the washer was the wise move. 

You can't see it well in this picture but there is still a very wet floor beyond the towel.

It's hard to see because the water had already been sopped up with towels but it went out about 6 rows of squares and almost all the way to the corner under the wall. 

Oh well we live and we learn and we now know that when you move your washing machine, you have to make sure that all the tubes stay connected as tightly as they should be. 

LESSON LEARNED. 

Now, the end! 

Thanks for checking in, until next time - Lindsey