Jail break

The Culprit

For 3 whole hours today my dark clothes were held hostage by my washing machine. Jinx—God bless her!—came over today to help me with laundry and ironing. I was waiting for my recent load of darks to finish when Jinx called me in to the laundry room. "The door won't open," she curiously told me. This had happened before, and I was already thanking my lucky stars that I had done ALL my laundry before the machine broke. (The last time my Kenmore HE2Plus decided to give me the F-U error on the display panel, it took them 2 weeks to order a new CCU panel for my machine, and I had to resort to family members' laundry room hospitality to wash all of Finn's baby clothes.) Sure enough, there it was again, flashing at me on the display, and the door lock light was on. After trying everything we could think of to open the dang door, I resorted to the rarely braved world of appliance technology blogs. Buried deep in the trenches of access codes and part numbers, I found it: "Door Lock Mechanism broken. To open, remove the lower panel (3 Torx screws), reach up and pull the ring on the bottom of the lock." All it took was the mental image of my clothes molding away in there until Monday when the repair man arrives (oh, the smell!). I was going in. Can I just take a moment to thank my Dad for making sure my emergency car kit (gifted to me circa 1999) was fully equipped with a socket wrench set?! They came in handy today as I lay flat out on the laundry room floor, face down, struggling to unscrew the teeny tiny screws that hold on that bottom panel. I would also like to thank the laundry gods for allowing my arm to not get caught way up in the inner-workings of the washer, as I fumbled around for the release latch. Click! My arm and laundry are free to see another day. I didn't fix the electronic problem, and my machine is still out of commission. But I was glad I didn't have to break off that fancy front loading door just to free my jeans! In the future, I am NOT going to be purchasing an electronically controlled washing machine. They are problematic, break just after the warranty runs out, and mine overflows water into the laundry room way too often. I am A-OK with top-loading reliable fail-safes.

Breaking and entering.

What tha... Is that the TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE (that I searched for for an hour) on the INSIDE of the hard to unscrew panel?! Wait—It's in a handy dandy ziploc pouch, to boot! Good thing it's kept safe and dry, and hidden away from the logical world.

For another feat of fix-it-yourself daring, visit here.