Thornes: 2, House: 1

There comes a time in the life of every home owner that you have to roll up your sleeves and do battle with the forces of home-entropy. Oh, sure, you clean up around the house, you mow the lawn, yadda yadda. These are skirmishes. Impolite encounters. No, the real hostilities commence when something breaks. And I'm talking about something with water in it.

Home Emergency #1
This happened and was mentioned in Mel's July 13 entry. We didn't blog about it in more detail because we didn't realize it was about to become a trend. I'll rectify that now, just so we can all draw our own conclusions about how handy the Thornes will be becoming over the period of their home ownership.

We noticed the kitchen drain peeing when I offered to show some friends our alternate toilet in the basement. I opened the door to point out that one could relieve themselves here should the other restroom be in use only to notice greasy water raining down from the joists. A couple of days later when Mel and I had time to actually begin to address the situation I was on the way out to the garage to get some tools to begin tearing stuff apart. As I passed through our back yard our neighbor Brandt spoke to me: "How's it going?" I complained of our situation, and Brandt began to tell me all the things I should do. 'Well, you TALK a pretty good game,' I thought. "Wanna come in and have a look?" As soon as he had a chance to check it out he started talking about how I need one of these, and some of that, and just do this... and he had tomorrow afternoon off and how about he just pick up the parts? I must admit that I felt a bit odd about this development. But he showed up with all sorts of PVC plumbing stuff. While I was out getting a tape measure Brandt pulled about a 5 ft section of pipe off of my basement ceiling. Don't leave Brandt alone in your house. But we managed to fit in the replacement PVC with some rubbery joints to mate it to the existing metal pipe. In the future I'll have an idea about how to accomplish this sort of thing, but choosing which joints to use and how to place them to connect two non-rectalinearly oriented bits of pipe seems like a question of instinct. This one might actually be "Neighbor Brandt: 1, House: 0"



Home Emergency #2
This one showed up Sunday night. Mel was doing laundry. I was slacking. Or maybe I was being useful, I don't remember. But Mel came up and asked me why the spin cycle might not work on our laundry machine. "The load is probably unbalanced," I said, wondering how my wife might not know this. Relief is not what I felt when I learned that the problem was not an unbalanced load. In a clothesless test run the washing machine fills up with water and then makes noises like it's running, but the agitator turns not. Thankfully the machine is capable of pumping the water in it back out, at least. We get out our 'fixin stuff in yer house' book (and the samurai fixit website linked by Mel) and have a look. Tilting the beast forward we are able to get a look at the intimate bits of our major appliance. There was a lot of shredded plastic laying under it. We were able to discern that the coupler - isolation disk - coupler assembly between the motor and the transmission had shredded itself. A few days later, about $16 dollars bought us a new assebly for our Whirlpool Cleantouch washer at Dey Appliance Parts.

BTW, even if your washer is called "Cleantouch", don't open it unless you must. The filth that you will find residing mere inches from where your clean clothes swirl was super super gross. I dunno, maybe your basement is cleaner then ours has been, but we were totally grossed out.

But that didn't stop us from fixing it. No, 2 hours was enough time for us to unhook everything, flip up the control panel and then pull forward the main housing, unhook and remove the water pump, then the main motor. This exposed the two coupler plates and the empty space where our isolation disk had been before being shredded to it's component quarks. We got some nasty brown grease on our hands, and what seemed to be dog hair as well (we have no dog - yet!), but we replaced the busted bits. Clearly, this brings the score to Thornes: 2, House: 0 (Brandt counts as a substitution). Shove it back into place and we'll get some laundry done, right? All we have to do is stick the drain out of the washer into that sink, and then hook the water inlets to their dedicated faucets, right? RIGHT?

Home Emergency #3
Can you guess what this is? I'll blog more about it when I've fixed it. Grrr.