Our Poor Kitchen

One washing machine’s load of water destroyed our kitchen

We saw the water running out and immediately started mopping up the water with all our house’s towels:

Yet another case of poor design that everyone uses

Washing machines drain their water through a rigid plastic hose with a sort of spout at the end. We Americans seem to like to use something called a washer outlet box to hold the water faucets and the drain pipe. Here’s one sold at Lowes:

The problem with this system is that the drain hoses can be very stiff and resist resting snugly in their holes.

The stupidity is universal and universally frustrating. Here is a common ad-hoc solution:

When a service person replaced the water hoses to our washing machine, he simply pushed the drain hose into the drain hole. The hose resisted but was in the hole.

It took a weekend for the company which had made the error to send someone to fix the problem. As you can see, the fix is really kind of jury-rigged. In my opinion, this is a sign of very poor design, one of those decisions made long ago that no one bothers to change.

Unfortunately, the washing machine evacuated its water with such force, that it came shooting back up out of the hole, pouring several gallons of water on our kitchen floor, as seen above.

Now the fun begins

I’m going to let the following photos tell you what has happened since we called our insurance company. They are making very sure that we have no possibility of fungus damage in the future. In the process, they discovered asbestos. Our kitchen is gradually disintegrating. On a happier note, we expect it to come back to life better than new. But it will take a long time.

Jax expresses our feelings