Dishwasher Disaster

If you had talked to me early Friday morning, I was gearing up for a lazy weekend with my husband, with a few errands and work related tasks sprinkled through.

If you had talked to me Friday afternoon, I was gearing up for a full Saturday of husband-less errands and chores and a completely lazy Sunday enjoying having him home from his 16-hr shift on Saturday.

If you talk to me today?  Neither was the case.

On Friday evening, D & I enjoyed a mediocre dinner at a local restaurant of fame.  Not sure what had been going on in the kitchen, but D's Bostonzone had 2, count em TWO pieces of chicken in it.  My small pepperoni & cheese calzone turned out to be an ENORMOUS pepperoni, ham, & mozzarella-with-a-giant-glob-of-ricotta-in-the-middle calzone.  Throughout dinner our topic of conversation was whether or not he should go out of town to work on Saturday.  Pro:  16 hrs of overtime.  Con: 16 hrs of work on a Saturday.  We reached the verdict that he would go, because who are we to turn down that kind of cash?

(Sidenote: the money he would have earned on Saturday was more than I made all week...in the most hours in a week I'd worked all year)

When we returned home, I was unloading my dishwasher, which had done a terrible job washing the dishes.  Half the load was being placed back in the sink to be washed again.  As I unloaded the last pieces, I noticed, to my horror, that the bottom of the washer was full of dingy water.  GROSS.

So we had plans to fix the washer.  D checked the hose and found nothing.  He ran his hands down along the bottom checking for clogs.  Nothing.  He called his dad.  Advice: put some Drano in it and run the rinse cycle again.

Here's the key point here:  Drano + dishwasher = disaster.  After about 5 minutes of rinse cycle, we had bubbles pouring out of our dishwasher.  Top, sides, bottom of the door.  Bubbles.  Laughing, we cleaned the chlorine reeking mess.  D's Mr. Fix-it advice to me, "Don't open the door.  Dad & I will fix it on Sunday.  It's a good thing I'm working tomorrow; we might need a new dishwasher."

Cool.

So we go to bed, and at 11:30 (yes, 11:30 PM, after a glorious 1.5 hrs of sleep), D's out of town boss calls and decides he does not indeed need to work Saturday.  Pro: D is home all day.  Con: we still need that cash I'd already mentally spent.

So here comes Saturday.  I had already planned a mega trip to Sam's Club.  I asked if D wanted to come along.  He said sure, and why didn't we just go look at dishwashers, too.  Several hours later, we made it to Lowe's, Sears, Home Depot, another Lowe's, and Sam's Club.  We also had made the decision to just buy a dishwasher rather than fix the one we had.  Besides, I had broken the soap dispenser months ago and it wasn't apparently, even really cleaning our dishes.  It rinsing them with the soap and then washing them with just water.  Gross.  Again.

So, by the end of Saturday, we had bought a dishwasher (this one, on sale), loaded it, ran it, went out to dinner with D's parents, and returned home to a washer full of clean, shiny dishes.

What kind of adventures did you have over the weekend?

Oh, and a public service announcement: Per the Lowe's guy - never put Drano in your dishwasher, it eats your seals.  So even if we had fixed it, we may have had water running out of it the next time we ran it anyway.  So don't do that, unless you want your husband to buy a new dishwasher.

Another public service announcement: When your husband is using his shop vac to get the Drano out of the dishwasher, it'll spew the bubbles out all over your refrigerator.  He'll laugh at you as you clean that up.