So there I am doing my usual Saturday routine of laundry, vacuuming, sweeping and Swiffer wet-jetting. (I don't consider using a Swiffer Wet Jet equivalent to mopping contrary to what the ads may have you believe.) This particular Saturday included the added treat of cleaning the bathroom. I ran down to the basement to grab something and the dryer was just humming. There was no clanking of change or buttons against the side of the drum - no movement whatsoever; just the hum of the heating mechanism. I opened the dryer and the top clothes were mostly dry, but the clothes at the bottom were still wet.
Like most people, my first instinct was to hit the dryer to get it to work. In this case, violence was not the answer. I shook it a little bit to try and get the drum to turn over. No dice. My initial reaction was "well, it had a good run - time to shop for a new one." I texted my boyfriend to let him know that we'd have to pick up a new dryer when he got off work. He asked some of the guys at work about it and they said that it was probably the drum belt which you can easily fix on your own. I just wanted my clothes dry, but I would wait until he got home.
In the meantime, I got to work on getting the clothes dry. I grabbed all of the hangers from my closet and started hanging the things I didn't want to wrinkle. Of course, I hung too many things from the shower curtain rod and it fell so I had to put that back up. All of the socks were laid out on the kitchen table, the towels and jeans were draped over tables and chairs, t-shirts on hangers were hung on cupboard doors. I pulled my hoodies and jackets off of the coat rack and replaced them with undershirts - the same with the towel racks. They 36 hours to dry completely.
When my boyfriend got home, he took the back of the dryer apart and we couldn't find a belt at all. We never claimed to be mechanical geniuses. We eventually found a broken belt through a hole in the back of the dryer. I found a YouTube video on how to change a dryer belt and apparently the top of the dryer comes up. Now we're cooking with oil.
Going to Home Depot on a Sunday makes me realize that I'm an adult. I look around and think "there are my new people." We couldn't find the dryer belts on our own so we asked an associate and Home Depot doesn't carry dryer belts in store. We went to Lowes, Kmart and Hawthorne's, but our dryer belt odyssey was unfruitful. The fact of the matter is that no one fixes their own appliances anymore. You either buy a new one or pay someone else to do it.
We went home exhausted from our quest and I ordered the part online. It shipped on Monday, but it still hasn't come because of the holiday. I'm writing this post from my parents' living room since I have to do laundry here until the dryer is fixed.
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