Our Washer Nightmare

So, after the Lowe’s trip last week on Monday, we decided to just bust out a piece of drywall behind the washer so we can easily run the new pipe, and Luke would build an access panel to cover the hole, so we can get to the pipes if necessary. After busting out that piece, we find the wires to the 220 dryer outlet and the normal outlet on that wall have gashes in the sheathing. The 220 actually has bare wire showing!!! Needless to say, it’s a BIG fire hazard. Obviously both of the wires need replaced, so we shut the breakers off, and proceeded to knock out another huge chunk of drywall, so we didn’t have to fish for the new wires nearly as much. We didn’t have the wire we needed, so we hung it up early Monday evening, and Luke asked for Tuesday off.

Tuesday comes and Luke and Chris go back to Lowe’s to buy wire. $80 worth of it! Wire gets expensive. The wire gets up through the wall flawlessly; it just takes a little time. Chris had to start getting ready for work at 3pm, so after he left, Luke finished with that wiring and decided since he has all the wiring stuff out, he would go ahead and redo the girls’ bedroom outlet, since it’s needed done for a few months. Check one thing off the list anyways eh? After that he got the pipe assembled, and took a break so we could get the kids bathed and put to bed. I went upstairs with him and watched the new pipe go in while I vacuumed up the mess on the floor, along with 4 years of lint since Mr. Bachelor Chris decides not to ever borrow the vacuum and sweep! Grrr. (That’s OK though, because I brought up my recycling trash bags and took a whole bunch of his glass bottles and cardboard he just has piled in his kitchen and bagged them up for trash…hahaha. He growled at me when he got home.) Anyways, the pipe works, the outlets work, the washer and dryer are hooked up and they work. We mounted an extra fluorescent light we had laying around, so now we actually have a light up there.

That little laundry room still needs some work. We need to borrow a truck and get a piece of drywall, but we also need a big ladder to make it to the second floor, so we can actually vent the dryer outside through a hole, and not through Chris’ living room window. The old light wire is connected to the rest of the old wiring and is still hot, so we just put some wire nuts on it. It needs shoved into the ceiling and we need to patch the ceiling. We also need to install baseboard and then paint everything and we will be good to go. The hardest part is getting a ladder for the dryer vent, and we need to do that before putting up the new piece of drywall. Our home improvement budget is completely drained now, and we even had to tap into the medical savings and use it since wire was so expensive. We also still need to buy some tile for the bathroom, since the local Lowe’s didn’t have enough edge tiles for the shower. I don’t know when we will start that project now.

Here are a few pictures: