laundry room disaster

Disaster has seeped through our laundry room the past few months. It began with a new iron. Its tail acted as a spring to tip over the iron throwing it on the ceramic tile. It broke the iron’s handle, snapped off the base and shattered the dial. My husband repaired it several times until I said enough already and bought a Teflon coated iron with a non-springy tail.
Then the ironing board disaster hit. After 28 years of use, the catch refused. The ironing board kept laying down when I tried to iron.
My husband fixed it. I insisted we had to buy a new one the day the legs and the board went their separate ways.
I thought I was ready to enjoy a spell of monotonous work in the laundry room until disaster struck the dryer. It left me a pile of cold, fluffy, damp clothes.
My handyman took the dryer apart and tested circuit after circuit, e-mailed the manufacturer’s trouble spot hotline and fixed it … for a while. Over the next several months I kept discovering damp loads of clothes. He fixed it every time.
The last time we had a dryer disaster, I brought home the name of an area shop that sold parts and machines. I laid the pictures of new machines on the table. We negated the idea: a new part cost a fraction of the cost of a new dryer and our wash machine worked fine.
During my handyman’s next trip to town to buy the parts required to repair things around the house, he surprised me and impulsively bought a new washer and daryer to replace our set from the 70s.
He hooked them up. A new broom sweeps clean, and a new dryer works pretty good, too. The dryer dried and fluffed our clothes in record time.
I was almost ready to share my new laundry room with overnight guests: five girls from a touring choir who were singing at our church. All I needed to do was figure out the difference between a slow spin and fast spin. I took the wash machine for a fast spin. It was a disastrous experiment. By the time the clothes were clean, I was splashing through a puddle of water on the bathroom floor.
Tracing the water to its source, my fix-it man took off the paneling on the wall behind the wash machine. the water had seeped down the wash machine’s drain pipe and pooled up under the bathroom cabinet.
That’s when we found out that the new wash machines have so much power that the old plumbing has to be upgraded. I could not believe that our 18-year-old house needed new plumbing.
Frantic to have it fixed before the five girls came, my plumber turned off the water, took apart the pipes and began tackling the problem. I looked at the mess, went to church and asked if someone with running water could provide the girls with bed and breakfast.
It was long after the girls had left town before the plumbing was upgraded. It only took several trips to town, cleaning the drain of old trapped lint, replacing a 2-inch black pipe with a 2-inch white pipe and installing a trap for the initial surge of water and rebuilding the wall.
It looks great. Too bad I never got to share it with the girls and chance them encountering the disaster lurking in our laundry room.