new dryer!

In addition to our goal of finishing the kitchen this year, we’re also aiming to do more laundry.

Aka – we finally have a dryer again!!!

Once we dug out our original receipt and realized we’d paid only $250 for our brand-new dryer 3 years ago, it really didn’t make sense to put $280 into fixing it. Our next thought was Craigslist, so we started scouring the postings for a gas dryer. Should you ever find yourself in our shoes, please note that there are far fewer gas dryers on the market than electric, and they’re more expensive. Awesome.

And yes, we did debate converting our house to work with an electric dryer, but that was a last-resort idea, since we’re kinda busy with other things like building kitchen cabinets.

We followed up on a couple listings, but we were always too late (it’s gone!), or the dryer was several hours away, or the reply sounded sketchy (no thanks). On our day-after-new-years-holiday we decided to see what was available on the retail market. 

Our first stop was ApplianceSmart, where we purchased our original washer/dryer set three years ago. They only had 3 gas dryers (vs 30-some electric) and the cheapest one was $400. Once we piled tax, hoses and connectors onto that price we were way above what we wanted to spend. Plus, it was a bottom-of-the-line dryer and it looked….cheap. We couldn’t bring ourselves to spend $500 on that.

We also checked out Sears, Home Depot, Lowes and Menards, but just couldn’t find anything that was a viable option. Which certainly isn’t to say there aren’t viable options out there, it’s just that we’re a little disenchanted with the dryer industry at the moment and had no interest in spending a lot of money on one, since our 3 year old purchase is now completely useless.

Frustrated, we turned back to Craigslist. We decided to just get  something, preferably a really cheap something, that will hopefully last for at least a couple years. The technician that came out to look at our old one said the best dryer on the market is the one made my Whirlpool with the lint trap on top, in the back-right corner. We later found out that any dryer with the lint trap in that location is made my Whirlpool (so Roper, Maytag and Amana are all under the Whirlpool umbrella). My parents happen to have that dryer and it’s the only appliance in their house they haven’t had to replace, so we were hoping to find something along those lines. He also suggested getting a simple machine, avoiding the electric panels (the $280 part that failed on our current dryer) and the bells and whistles. The less there is, the less there is to go wrong.

Finally, yesterday, we got our dryer! Someone had what we were looking for listed as name-your-price. We offered $175, they took it, we brought home a dryer.

Hallelujah.

We still need to get new hoses (by law we can’t re-use the old ones), but we should be doing laundry by this weekend. Which is good, because I’m running out of socks. Again. And we’ve been doing a lot of laundry-mooching off our generous parents for the past month.

Also – because some of you have asked, we did consider just hang-drying everything. We already do a lot of line drying (all of our gym gear, dress pants and a lot of dressy shirts), but reality is that we’re just not home enough to line dry everything. We have enough trouble staying on top of our laundry when we only need to throw it in the dryer. If we have to hang everything up in the limited space we have available we’d never get through it all. That’s just reality.

There you have it! We’re back on the road to clean clothes. Anybody out there line dry everything? Replaced a dryer recently? Need to do some laundry? (Come try out our cool new toy!)