Day 252: C'mon on baby, light my fire (hazard)

Our kitchen, which you have now had the pleasure of seeing, flows into the laundry room. So if we are going to take out a whole kitchen floor, why leave the linoeum in the laundry room alone? Why not do it all? So that was is the plan. However, after the debacle of removing kitchen flooring we thought we might wait a little bit and actually get a new floor in one room before ripping out the floor in another. Don't worry, we bought 540 square feet of tile, something or someone will be tiled!

So instead of removing the floor immediately, we chose to remove the old washer and dryer. I wanted to keep them, well, because I'm cheap and if it ain't broke, don't fix it! But the Hubs convinced me that washers and dryers that have sitting around gathering dust shouldn't attempt to clean our clothes. So we took them out to the dumpster and found a lovely, non-vomit inducing scene under the washer.

Again, it case you didn't see it last time

If you have never moved a washer or dryer to clean under the appliance, may I recommend you do so? I'm still shuddering at the smell and feel of cleaning that mess. You'll also notice in that picture we have a wonderful plastic hose protruding from a rather large hole in the wall. We saw that and said, hey well get one of those new fangled metal pipes and close up that hole. It'll be like new! But we didn't have a washer or dryer, so it went to the back burner.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, we helped my coworker move and she gave us her 3 year old washer and dryer as a thank you. SCORE! Free washer and dryer, now we don't have to wash our clothes in the creek (ok, a friends house, but you get the point)! And last weekend we were finally close enough to being out of underpants done enough with the kitchen, to work on this hole/pipe situation.

First I scouted around the outside looking for the vent. No dice.  So I looked further up the house, closer to the roof for a vent. Still nothing. Then I remembered this weird screened in area under the stairs one could access from the basement.

That's a strange place for dryer lint

When we pulled the screen off the joists, this is what we found:

Yes, that is a cubic yard of dryer lint in the house. Thank goodness it didn't catch fire and burn the whole house down. I guess the previous home owners were of the opinion that dryers don't need to vent outside, they just have to vent to where you can clean the lint. Please note that is a terrible idea. So while replacing the pretty plastic hose with a better metal one, we will also be blowing a hole in the outside wall to vent the dryer.

 I will keep you posted. And someday I dream of having all clean clothes. Thank goodness we have 9 sets of sheets and an obscene amount of towels.