A Load of Laundry Gone Horribly Wrong...

*As we said in our introductions, we will not be posting our real names. However, we have come up with a clever alternative, and our "code names" will be our favorite city or a city we would very much like to visit. Dallas= dad, Lubbock= mom, Maui= oldest daughter, and Juneau= youngest daughter.*

*post written by Maui*

Today began nicely, with the sun slowly coming out and the weather warming. This is always a nice surprise for early spring in Iowa, where many days it is still cold and gray. Lubbock and I began our day by building a vanity for my bedroom as a part of the decorating process. Our family just moved in to this house, and today was another day of decorating my new room. After we had successfully built the cute vanity, I decided to wash my bed sheets. I took them off, threw them in our washer; no biggie!

Wrong.

During the wash cycle, Lubbock and I were downstairs working on some crafts in our down time, all the while hearing our washer's "unbalanced" alarm go off. However, each time after a few seconds the alarm would stop. So we would wait, and then go back to work when the alarm stopped. We took to joking, "Angry laundry!" After we were finished crafting, I decided to take our Basset Hound puppy, Noodle, for a walk. We went upstairs, I prepped Noodle for his walk, and Lubbock gasped. "The laundry machine walked itself away from the wall and leaked all over this floor!" Oh, no. I took Noodle on his walk since he was so excited, and came back to an upset Lubbock tinkering with the back of the washer. The hose had loosened from the machine, and every time water was pumped in or out, a huge puddle formed in the floor. For now, we've taken to blaming the person who installed it, since they neglected to put on a clamp that would have potentially been able to hold the hose in place. Despite the initial shock and inconvenience, we cleaned up the mess and managed to get the sheets in the dryer.

About an hour later, every smoke detector in our house sounded the alarms. After much confusion and searching for a fire that wasn't there, we had to evacuate us and all four of our dogs into the street until someone from MidAmerican could come see what was going on. As I sat in the back of our truck with the two bulldogs and Noodle, I of course put a video on Snapchat, cursing this hell-of-a-year that 2020 has been. Once the very nice and helpful MidAmerican man had completed his investigation, we were told that the water from the washer incident had run through the wall/floor barrier of the pantry, down into the socket of a smoke detector, and shorted out the detector, causing a house-wide smoke detector panic.

All because I wanted to wash my sheets.

I think it's safe to say I'm going to be a lot more precise and thoughtful about how I do my laundry with this fickle machine from now on.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

-Maui :)