Laundry!

Yesterday we finally got a dryer. Ours went out a few days ago. It was taking longer and longer to dry a load of clothes. At one point I was having to run the dryer three whole cycles just to dry one load of clothes. Finally, it just quit heating up altogether.

Erick tried to fix it. Some of my Facebook friends suggested that replacing a heating coil was an easy fix. Erick is pretty handy about fixing things, but one thing he hasn't had any experience fixing is dryers. That may be because his parents dried their clothes on a clothesline when he was growing up and he didn't get the chance to learn how to fix one.

He gave it a good try, though. He looked it up on the Internet and took it all apart, but when he was done with it, it didn't work at all. Our neighbor came over and looked at it, too, and I guess neither of them could figure it out.

So we bought a used one last night. Our neighbor had told us about a Facebook group that posted classified ads in our area and we found a used one for $75. It's nothing fancy, but it dries clothes, and we are waaaay behind right now. I haven't seen stacks of laundry like this since we lived in the trailer and I had to take my laundry to my in-law's house each weekend. That was back when we only had two babies. By spring, we'd literally have laundry stacked to the ceiling. (Remember, they didn't have a dryer!) In the winter, we'd take home baskets of wet laundry after washing it all load by load in their wringer washer, and we'd put it on the front porch so it would stay fresh-smelling until we could get it all dried. Then we'd bring each load in, one at a time, and let it thaw. We'd drape them over chairs and drying racks and cabinet doors until they dried, and then bring in another load to thaw. Our clothes were always stiff back then.

We have come such a long way since then. This new dryer might not be top-of-the-line, but at least I can dry a load of clothes in a reasonable amount of time. By the end of the day I except to have a mountain of clean laundry instead of a mountain of dirty laundry.