When Appliances Push You To Adult

Raise your hand if you actually enjoy adulting. I am sure not one of you raised your hand. Adulting blows. Especially when you don’t generally feel qualified to be an adult, in the first place. When there is an adult situation happening around me, I usually scan the room hoping to find the adult in charge. An adultier adult than myself.

But sometimes in life you ARE the adult. The buck stops with you.

I am the mother of four messy children and the wife to a husband who makes multiple costume changes daily. Whether he is headed into the office or coaching rec sports or mowing the grass. He has an outfit for that.

Except he has never actually used the term outfit. I threw that in for effect. That’s my creative right.

I do a lot of laundry. I wash clothes pretty much 365. Point being, my washing machine gets a lot of action.

So imagine my mood when my washer refused to do it’s job. Right in the middle of a cycle, my Bosch washing machine waved a white flag. Error 13 to be exact.

No. No. NO! I had never seen an Error 13. Error 3 sure. That meant I had not closed the door properly. But Error 13, I had no idea. So, naturally I took to Google.

Google: Error 13 is a drain timeout code. This means the pump has run a certain amount of time without fully draining. Washer will not drain.

So, naturally I took to YouTube. (What did we do before the internet?)

Not wanting to pay a repair person to fix something that I could fix myself, and me having NO actual knowledge about fixing appliances, I poured over videos of repair people fixing Error 13s.

Step one: clean the drain.

Cleaning a drain is usually pretty simple. I pour some Liquid Plumber. Then I forget to go back in fifteen to thirty minutes to flush with hot water. So, I pour more Liquid Plumber, then repeat the process until I eventually remember that last part. Done.

But according to this YouTube guy I was going to need to gather a sharp tool, water-catching pan, large towel and some elbow grease. Picture me sitting on the floor, holding my phone displaying the video, preparing to whip my washer back into submission. No one or thing just quits in this family.

I managed to get the bottom washer panel off and drained a tiny hose without incident. Next, I had to get a round trap unscrewed from a hole. I pulled the cylinder part out and disgusting does not begin to cover it.

Eleven years of laundry was evident. If that trap could talk.

A bobby pin, penny, small chain and a whole lot of sludge and tiny rocks. Ew. I removed everything the shouldn’t have been left in people’s pockets in the first place, and cleaned away all of the nasty gunk.

I carefully put everything back together and replaced the panel. I am not a handy person in the least. And I don’t normally enjoy black filth under my manicured fingernails. I am a girly girl at heart. But I am a girly girl who is not afraid to get her hands dirty if it saves my family money.

I will admit though, had this been before YouTube, we would have been screwed. Thank you whichwasher2007. You have 8.7K subscribers for a reason. #ApplianceBoss.

I was so busy patting myself on the back that I almost forgot to restart the load of clothes. I pressed the start button, prepared to watch the fruits of my labor. The unit went through the wash portion of the cycle, then it prepared to drain. This was where the problem had occurred before. The anticipation was killing me. I almost couldn’t watch.

I didn’t have to watch though because my washer started beeping obnoxiously AND flashing a bright red Error 13.

According to whichwasher2007, it was certainly a pump problem. He encourage me to delve deeper into the machine and remove the pump to see if it was jammed, but I knew that if I did that, the machine nor I would never be the same again.

And this is where it became abundantly clear that my future as Bellonheels Washing Machine Repair Extraordinaire was simply not to be. The pain was almost too much to bear. But at age 45, I have learned that disappointment is a part of life. My children, who had observed my struggle, offered their condolences. One even hugged me.

After a discussion with Hubs about the age and condition of the machine we decided not to sink any more money into it. I have never called an appliance repair person out for less that $400. It was time to do some real adulting. It was time to buy a new machine.

Sigh.

After lots of online research, brand and model comparisons, price consideration and multiple trips to the store, we found the winner. And by WE, I mean I, because my husband was only there for moral support, as he hasn’t done a load of laundry in fifteen years. But in his defense, I haven’t mowed the grass. Marriage is about teamwork.

Raise the roof for the LG WT7200C! (snazzy name, right?)

#WashingMachineSelfie

I loved the machine so much that I got the matching dryer.

Because my previous dryer deserves its own blog post.

Here’s to adulting! Now I have to go wash clothes.

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