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Tinker

While my mum did her best to instill me with domestic virtue, I always preferred handing my dad tools while he did car repairs or built something to cooking or cleaning. I know how to do those things, but I never was able to match her enthusiasm for Cleaning Fridays, and I was baffled by her nostalgic love of hanging laundry out to dry and hand washing dishes, especially since we had functional machines that did those tasks for us, and using them meant more time to read or make something. 


Now, as an adult, I do what it takes to keep everyone clothed and fed and to keep the ants at bay, but if anyone else expresses interest in any of those sort of tasks, I am happy to let them at it. Are your clothes put away in such a way that you can find what you're looking for? Great! Are the dishes in the dishwasher sufficiently rinsed and properly spaced so that it can do its job? Spectacular! I do not care how it's done, only that it's done.

As the adult who is home the most and therefore uses them the most, appliance repair generally falls to me (although I happily leave plumbing and yard work to my handy husband). I've put the oven door back on and persuaded our washing machine start button to perform its designated function, among other things. Most recently it was the dryer.

Now, there is no reasonable way to know that a dryer is broken but by putting wet clothes into it and then getting wet clothes out of it sometime later, but I would have preferred for those wet clothes not to have been every garment the kids own except what they were currently wearing. As mentioned in my last post, my immediate temporary solution was a clothesline. I strung 80 feet of line in a zig zag between our back deck railing and a stand of trees in our yard, both of which were spaced well for the project. The weather was cooperative (sunny enough, warm enough) although it did take an entire day to dry a single load of laundry.

Next was taking the dryer apart. We got it apart, I narrowed down the issue to the heating element, he cleaned out all the ducts (including the one that goes up into the attic) and installed the part I ordered. It appears that there were two unrelated problems: one, that the ducts were clogged with lint (and socks) which was why it would take three hours to dry. And two, that sometime in the past few weeks the duct  connecting the lint trap to the outside of the dryer had come loose and allowed a whole bunch of lint to get into the heating element, which thoughtfully burnt itself out instead of starting a fire. With both of those issues corrected (for a total investment of less than $30) it now dries clothes in less time than the washer takes to cycle, which it has never done in the entire time we've had it, and as a bonus is no longer a fire hazard. Diagnosing and fixing a problem is so satisfying!
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