Airing Our Dirty Laundry

Larry went ahead with his nefarious plan to empty a good third of the contents of our laundry room into our family room, so the delivery guys could move our brand new, stackable washer/dryer into place and remove the old ones. And I did my best to ignore the chaos created, even though Larry took away my freestanding pantry shelves because he wanted to turn the refrigerator around so the door handle wouldn't block the delivery guys' way. The family room was filled with stuff, I couldn't find my food, the laundry room was newly chaotic (because he moved other stuff around in there); yet through it all I said nothing, because, hey, we were getting our dryer today and that meant I could stop begging all my neighbors to let me use theirs.

Made of money, that's what we are...

And then I learned, half an hour before the delivery, that the dryer (a gas one) would not actually be installed today.  Even though the previous dryer was also gas, and even though we already had the gas line sitting in the right place. I also learned that having it installed would cost me an extra $140.

One hundred and forty dollars. Tell me, am I really saving any money by having a gas dryer if I spend an extra $140 each time I replace it? On top of the extra $100 it costs in the first place? Probably not. I could have just bought an electric one and it would be plugged in and running RIGHT NOW.

So, after 3 phone calls, I learned the dryer will be installed Friday. I told Larry this (he came home to deal with the delivery, in case there were problems), and he said, "Gee - so long as we have to wait, maybe I should insulate the outside wall of the laundry room this week; then we could install the dryer there instead, and we wouldn't have to pay to move it later!"

Isn't it obvious that this man hates me?

"Look," I said. "This is incredibly complicated. You can't do it by Friday."

"I'd have to do the floor by then, also," he said, more to himself than to me, because really, when it comes to his insulation fetish, has he EVER listened to me? "I need that subflooring to stop the condensation..." Before I knew it, he's talking on the phone with our handyman, trying to figure out if he can pull it off.

No. No, he can't. Our handyman convinced him of that. So I get my dryer connected on Friday, in its original spot, but Larry is still gung-ho on insulating the laundry room NOW, since he moved so much stuff out of there already. "I'll just get everything else out of there this weekend," he said. "Andy said he could help me next weekend - that'll be perfect!"

WHOSE laundry room looks like this? Not mine.

Perfect. Yeah, that must have been the word I was looking for. People, there is SO MUCH STUFF in that laundry room. Larry went down to survey the situation again, while I sat upstairs and breathed into a paper bag and wondered how much divorces cost. He came back up and said, "I guess if we had a bigger house, we would just fill it up with more stuff?"

It was his jovial, aren't-we-just-packrats-together tone that got to me.

"No, WE wouldn't fill it up," I told him. "YOU would fill it up." And I left the house for a very long walk.


All of this to say, there's a reason I have over 23,000 steps on my Fitbit today. And, believe me, those weren't nearly enough.



[Dollars image: Clipart Panda]