The Demise of the Washer

Our Washer died....
About 2 months ago it started making this horrible whining/screaming/rattling noise when it was spinning the water out of the clothes. Then, about a month ago, it just stopped spinning. I went to get the clothes out at the end of the cycle and there were the clothes, still very wet and sitting in a foot of water. Yuck!

So, Jake opened it up and the belt was all ripped up and stringy. I went and bought a new belt, and he replaced it. (which sounds much simpler than it was- if you've ever replaced a belt on a washing machine you know that there are five or six bungee cord-like attachments around the tub to help it spin right and that they are stretched within a millimeter of their stretchy life and that means YOU have to stretch them out and attach them from around the edge of one side of the tub, then underneath the tub and then up to the opposite edge of the edge of the tub... Insane! Maybe if you're a repair man you have some fancy tool to do this stretching manuever. We don't. So Jake did it by hand and foot and whatever else was available...) So, then I put another load in. A small load. A tiny load, really. And it worked great.

Then I put in a regular sized load... And halfway through the spinning cycle we started smelling this funny burning smell, then we started seeing a little bit of smoke coming up the stairs, then I yelled, "The washer!!!" I ran down the stairs to find the laundry room fully of grey cloudy smoke... So, the belt itself is not the problem... The washing machine is eating the belt somehow. Lovely. And we're gonna have to pay a repair man to fix it all somehow... Lovely.