The Joy of Appliances

We have recently been made ridiculously happy through the acquisition of a new washer and dryer. The old ones were starting to hobble, and it turns out my company's discount on them is significant. Add to that the tax credits available for Energy Star items, which pretty much everything is these days, and we were off to the races.

Here are the space-age machines, stacked because A) they can be, and B) our laundry room is more of a laundry cubby, and expanding the usable space by even a few inches makes our lives much more pleasant. Take special note of the gas line on the left, which I think of as more of a bruisemaker than a gas line. That red knob is 2 feet, 6 inches from the right-hand wall, and while I often curse the idiot who put it there, I am glad they made it sturdy.



Mowgli has a collection of approximately 1.5 million tools and is not at all intimidated by things like the possibility of getting electrocuted, so we opted to have him handle the installation. I admit to being nervous -- you never know what you're going to run into, even in an 11-year-old house, and I had to resist the nightmare scenarios that popped into my head unbidden. I conjured up floods of water cascading into the basement from the first-floor bathroom through an open pipe that could not be turned off while Mowgli yelled instructions to me and I did my best not to scream at him. Which actually happened, years ago, in my old house.

But happily, history did not repeat itself, and everything went relatively smoothly, i.e., we got through it with only two mid-project trips to the big-box hardware warehouse. One of those was for dryer vent parts. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say Mowgli had some choice words for the folks who built our house. He was pretty diplomatic, though: "They're not supposed to do that" and "Those idiots!" were about as salty as he got.

Once everything was hooked up, we inched the six-foot-tall technological wonder into place by shoving our bodies against it in precisely choreographed little bursts. We tossed some clothes in, consulted the manual, poured the right amount of detergent in the fancy little additive drawer, and gingerly pushed the necessary buttons. Then we sat down to watch.

That's right. We sat on the linoleum floor of the laundry cubby and gazed in wonder at the clothes as they tumbled back and forth, making comments like "What's it doing?" and "That's amazing." and "Wow."

The next morning, I found a stack of folded clothes, and a note. Here's a closeup:

In case you can't make it out, it says, "The dryer is so awesome that it even folds the clothes!"

Now that's a good dryer.