Monday, 18 August 2008

• Craigslist Saved Us from Another Laundry Nightmare

  by Mama Turtle

  Not long after the old dryer died, my washing machine followed shortly afterward. Appliance-time-wise, something major kicking the bucket a few months after some other major thing kicks the bucket that you spent money on to replace is a kick in the teeth. A month ago I was doing wash and noticed that the machine had started making this higher pitched whistling sort of sound when it was spinning. Shortly after the whistling started, the burnt rubber smell started. And a day after that, I dashed into the room to find a cloud of stinky rubber smoke filling the air. Eeeks! I had pushed the machine to its limits, and it was not to be turned on again. Though I put it through it's paces, this machine was only a six year old Maytag! 
  
  The weeks went by and the laundry piled up. If there is one chore I do keep on top of well, it's the laundry. With a family of six, there's little choice. I also twitch at the thought of laundry sitting for a while and starting to get funky - yes, I was doing a lot of twitching the past few weeks! Finally we dragged everything to the laundromat where I proceeded to spend $13 on just washing it all (we took it home to dry). That bothered Miss Frugalness greatly, not to mention getting Papa Turtle out the door and to the laundromat on his day off was a challenge. It ended up being our first and last patronage there.
  
  Papa Turtle started asking me to find a used washing machine on Craigslist. I sifted through the ads but spooked at the prices. Finally someone had put up a washing machine for $50 bucks, but no picture, and the description was seriously lacking other than "it worked." I emailed to ask what brand it was and other such details. I didn't mind that it was an older model, as like most things that are older, they were often built a lot better. All I got for a response was that it was a Whirlpool large capacity something or other. I gathered they had no means for pictures, so I thought, "well things are tight for right now, but we could bite the bullet and get something that runs until we can buy a new washing machine, or just keep feeding the laundrymat dozens of quarters at a shot, which may amount to more money spent in the long run...."
  
  Papa Turtle and Uncle B went to go pick up the washing machine while I put up our broken one on Freecycle. I figured perhaps someone could really fix it up or use it for parts. Sure enough, someone messaged me to say it was her husband's hobby to fix these and she was sure he would want this. Great, an unusable appliance was going to be out of my hair and not taking up space. Papa Turtle got back with the machine and I think the first word I heard was "nasty." Uh oh. Turned out that "nasty" didn't even begin to describe it.

  
  Example picture of just how "retro" it is

  I went outside to the driveway where they stuck it. First of all they related that the house they pulled it out of was in a state of squalor. If I had been there I would have haggled the lady down in price if not turned around and ran straight out of there empty-handed.  It was definitely an older model, like about 20 years old. Papa Turtle said it couldn't be that old but I said I was pretty good at dating things and "retro" is a nice way of describing this machine. That wasn't the bad thing of course. What was bad was the gunk that was inside of it. The barrel was pretty clean, and no rust, thank goodness, but the top of the barrel had years of accumulated substance. Algae, soapy, linty, stuck on cottage cheese like substance. There was a fabric softener dispenser inside the agitator and inside the dispenser was what turned out to be some kind of black papery stuff. I cleaned out most of it, but since I don't use fabric softener anyways, I left it out of the machine. Papa Turtle went back out to get a garden hose, some bleach and some Lime-away.
  
  We took turns hosing out the inside of the machine and I spent a good hour and a half outside in the sun finishing up getting all the gunk out, hoping that it did in fact work. We hooked it up outside (thank goodness for outdoor outlets!) and voila, it did work! We ran the whole bottle of Lime-away through the first cycle and we dumped a half a bottle of bleach into the rinse cycle. Then I ran it through again with just plain water. Finally we dragged it inside and hooked it up. Uncle B offered up his clothes as a guinea pig, and phew, it worked. I have spent the whole rest of the weekend catching up on laundry, quite happily if you can believe it.
  
  While going through all of this, a happy accident happened. While the hose was still hooked up, Papa Turtle decided to spray off the porch (really just a concrete slab 2 inches off the ground) to clean it a bit. He ended up knocking off the outside dryer vent cover with the hose in the process - I noticed it later. Uncle B picked up the vent cover and I said "whoah." I pretty much instantly discovered why my brand new dryer was working so poorly shortly after we got it (to my dismay, I was running 70-80 minute long cycles per load). I'd kept the lint trap clean, we'd opened up the back of it, took off the dryer hose, stuck the vacuum cleaner hose into what we could just in case,  but everything was clear. I thought we had a bum dryer and I was ready to take it back, actually. But I also thought it was weird that it seemed fine until the day I accidently let a ball of lint get sucked into the lint trap compartment. I'd basically discovered that ball of lint trapped in the grate of the outdoor vent cover, so badly there was almost no way for air to pass through.
  
  So I'm ecstatic that we have a machine that works well enough to get us through a few months at least and considering the work I put into it, I can resell it for at least what it cost us to buy and clean it. Even better, my new dryer is working like a champ, and dry times for a full load has fallen back down to 50 minutes or less.
  
  Have you ever purchased used items for the home?  If so, did they work out well for you?

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