Washed up

So I was taking the trash out the other night when I walked into my garage and said, “Hmm. Standing water. That’s weird.”
Most people would have immediately sought out the source of the problem. I am not most people. I backed my wife’s van out of the garage and used a shop broom to sweep the water out of the garage. This was a logical course of action, as I was taking the denial approach, banking on the belief that if I simply escorted the water out of the garage, whatever created it would magically disappear.
So the next day, I went into the garage and saw more water standing. Clearly, magic had not occurred. I walked over to a storage closet in the garage and saw another small pool. I looked up at the ceiling. The drop of water that smacked me in the forehead clued me in that maybe, just maybe, there was a problem.
The leak was coming from where our washing machine lives, which is upstairs in our bonus room. Over the years, several people have commented that having a washing machine upstairs would be a big problem if it ever leaked. Glad to know I would finally find out if they were right.
My first step was to go upstairs and poke around the back of the washing machine with a flashlight. And one thing became very clear in short order — behind a washing machine is the nastiest place in a home, easily trumping under the fridge or that little u-shaped bend under your kitchen sink that, should you accidentally hit it when putting up a pitcher, will spew gobs of nasty stuff onto the cabinet floor.
Once I got over the ick that was behind my washer, I continued to search for the source of the leak. I didn’t even bother to hope for some simple solution, because the last time I hoped for a simple plumbing solution, I ended up with my entire water line having to be rerouted to my house. So I opted to assume catastrophe and warn my family that it was a distinct possibility that the side of the house was going to fall off any minute now.
Eventually, I decided to call a plumber as it was clear that unless the beam of a flashlight fixed things, I was out of luck. The plumber came out and told me there were two options: Cut open the wall and look for a leak or cut open the ceiling and look for a leak. Not exactly the greatest options in the world.
I was pretty much resigned to having him cut the ceiling, since it was in a closet and would not really matter aesthetically. I went downstairs to take a last look at the ceiling to make sure this was the right decision. He was upstairs and filled up the washer just to poke around and see what was what. He came down a few minutes later. “Uh, it’s your washer, not the pipes.”
Sure enough, the machine was leaking and was filling the drain pan and then overflowing, leaking through the ceiling. Now you may wonder why I had not noticed this. And the answer is twofold: (1) By the time I had seen the leak, it was already on the garage floor and (2) I can diagnose home repair problems about as well as I can diagnose a parrot’s illness.
So the next step was to call someone out to repair the washing machine. (Yea! More service call fees!) I called the department store where I bought the washer 15 years ago. I was told someone could come out in two weeks. I told them I would probably want clean underwear before then and called a local company.
The local company was out there in about an hour. In about four seconds, he had the washer completely disassembled. It was like a Transformer unfolding. He turned on the water and we had this conversation:
ME: So what do you think?
HIM: I think you need a new washing machine.
ME: You can’t fix it?
HIM: Yeah, but it will cost more to fix than to buy a new one.
ME: Hey, how come water is spewing out of the sides of it?
Apparently, one basic function a washing machine is supposed to do is keep the water in the barrel, which mine no longer did. With the front cover off of the machine, it was pretty easy to see that my washer was failing Being a Washing Machine 101.
At that point, I rolled the dice and took the following gamble: I asked him how long it would take to get a new washer. He told me they could have it installed after lunch. “Let’s do it,” I said.
Now, the reason this was a gamble is because my wife loves her some research. She will check the web, read reviews, talk to friends. She knows every fact about every appliance that comes in our house. We were about to buy a TV one time when – I kid you not – she left the store to drive home and look up something on the Internet, because she had this nagging suspicion she had failed to check out one particular component of a TV. (She called me from home to tell me to buy a different one.)
When I told my wife that I had bought a new washer, she stared at me for a half-second, and maybe even had a minor facial twitch. Realizing this had been a rather stressful episode for me, she opted to allow my impulse buy to be my therapy, I guess.
The new washer seems to be working fine, and hopefully this one will last 15 years, too. I guess the upside is that I now know what happens when I get a leak upstairs. Oh, the price of knowledge.