Happy Endings

On Sunday night, as I was cleaning up downstairs, I decided to clean the filter pump on my LG washer. My washer and dryer are located in a small laundry closet in my kitchen, and I try to clean the washer pump filter out as recommended, about once a month. I got a small basin and sat down on the floor and first drained the hose, then replaced that and removed the filter, which, as usual, needed cleaning, mostly because Chili has a heavy coat and sheds a lot. I removed what I could by hand, then rinsed the filter out in the sink until it was perfectly clean. Then, rather than sitting down on the floor again to carefully screw it back into place, I just reached down and put it into the slot and turned it a few times, to secure it.

 

Late Monday morning, I did a load of wash. An hour or so later, when I walked into my kitchen, I discovered the kitchen floor was completely flooded. I have 5' x 7' woolen area rugs with heavy felt pads in both the kitchen and the breakfast nook, and the rugs and pads were soaked, as were the wooden floors beneath. The rugs and pads weighed a ton soaking wet, so I dragged them one at a time out onto my patio, where it was raining heavily, but not having a garage, that was my only option. Inside, I first put towels all over the floor to soak up the water, and then spent some time figuring out what had happened. Once I was sitting on the floor directly in front of the pump filter slot, I could see that it wasn't all the way in, so most of the water used when the machine was on had ended up being pumped out onto the floor. On the plus side, front load machines use considerably less water than top loaders, but it was still a lot of water on wooden floors. I removed and re-inserted and secured the pump filter, then spent the rest of the afternoon moving everything I could out of the kitchen so the floor could dry thoroughly.

 

I don't think the rug pads can be saved, so I ordered new ones. The rugs are both inexpensive. The one in the pic is from IKEA. But I like them and wasn't sure I could easily replace them, so I decided to take both rugs to a laundromat with commercial sized machines. I was worried the rugs would be too big and heavy for those machines, but I needn't have worried: those machines are so big it was almost like washing potholders in a regular machine. I washed each rug separately, in hot water, and then dried each rug separately, which took forever. When I brought them home they were both still a bit damp, so I laid them out on my seagrass rugs in the living room to finish drying.

 

Both rugs were several inches too big for the areas where I was using them, which was a real pain because it meant I had to fold the edges under to the size they should be. So this morning I decided that since both rugs were now as clean as when they were new, I might as well take them to get them cut down to the right size. But when I laid them out on the floor to see how much needed to be trimmed, I discovered to my delight that both rugs had shrunk to the point that I no longer need to have them cut down. So there really was a silver lining to this mishap.