this rarely ever happens...

Yet another interesting quirk about our house has made itself known while the kitchen renovation is underway. After the whole flooring debacle we thought things were running smoothly. We were even ahead of schedule with finishing the floor and had two coats of polyurethane down. Well so we thought...

Even if your kitchen is unusable the rest of the household is still pretty much business as usual which includes loads upon loads of laundry especially in the summertime.

I finally had a time where crews of workers weren’t in and out of our house so I threw a load of laundry in the washer. Once that was done I quickly threw it into the dryer without a seconds hesitation and this is where the “fun” started. Our laundry is on the lower level of our split level ranch. Ran back upstairs to collect more laundry and came back downstairs to a faint burning smell. I start sniffing around. My husband jokes I have the nose of a bloodhound. Yet I can’t find the source in the house. I give up trying to find the origin and a few hours later ask my husband if he smells it. He thinks I’m going crazy and he can only smell the polyurethane sealer which has permeated the whole house. Well I finally have time to grab the laundry out of the dryer and the smell hits me like a ton of bricks- burning electrical. All the clothes smell like that. 

We think with all the kitchen renovations and overages on it what can we do? Buy another clothes dryer? See if it can be repaired? Our wallets are crying at this point.

We decide to go the cheaper route and get it repaired, if possible. We call our local appliance store and they can come the next day to check it out. The bad news, I had to wait for the service repair person to tell me nothing was wrong with it because as soon as we mentioned renovating the kitchen and redoing the floors he knew instantly why my gas dryer was giving off a horrible smell. Good news it wasn’t broken.

It turns out if there is not enough ventilation while an oil based polyurethane sealer is used, a gas dryer will burn the fumes and make everything inside it smell even worse. Great news it will fix itself, horrible news it will take a week to do that and could happen again once the last coats of finish are put on the flooring. The repair person said he has only seen this happen three times in his thirty plus years of appliance work. 

So we are now without a dryer even if it is fully functional. It might be summertime but we have to hang all our clothes in the basement to dry. Hanging clothes outside is best but with my husband’s environmental allergies that is a big nope. So my basement now looks like a laundromat and we have another couple of weeks before we can use our gas dryer again. Oh well, our wallets are not crying any harder than they were already and it’s something with can live with short term. It’s just another peculiarity of my house.