You know how I said...

....on the meme that I always forget to start the dishwasher at night and I was working on that?

Well, now I know a good reason NOT to start the dishwasher at night. Two weeks ago, I started the dishwasher as I try to, late at night before bed, and I actually set it to start in 1 hour so I could fill up my jacuzzi tub and have a nice warm bubble bath and read a book. It started all right.... and ran....and ran....and ran......


...and when Jake got up the next morning for football practice, the dishwasher valve that shuts off the filling of the water had stuck..... and the dishwasher was dumping water - hot water - all over my floor and had been doing that since midnight. It was now 6:40 a.m. Jake found it and ran in our bedroom and got Bart, up; I was already in the shower because I had to be at the community college where I'm taking classes really early to get my schedule changed and had been told to get there earlier than the posted start time since I really needed my online classes.

So when I got out of the bathroom at 7:10, I was greeted with the sight of my husband and oldest 2 sons and every single towel we own (and with 4 1/2 baths, that's a lot of towels!!!!) mopping up the floor in about 6 rooms of my house. The water flooded the kitchen of course, that was tile; it went under the wall that is the living room wall to soak the living room carpet, it went past the kitchen towards the front of the house into the dining room which has hardwoods, and into the front hall which also has hardwoods. There was so much water that it ran out the kitchen door and into the back hall which leads to our bedroom and the door into the garage. The carpet in the back hall was soaked, all 10 feet of it, and the water ran into the master bedroom. It also went under the wall in the back hall to soak Bart's closet floor and under the dining room wall to get the floor in the master bedroom wet on another wall.

And it's only funny because in nearly 18 years of marriage, we have only had 1 insurance claim on our houses in all that time. Unfortunately that claim was water damage also and it occurred right before Christmas last year. The back hall was soaked as well as Bart's closet. So we have had to replace the carpet pad in the back hall and his closet 2 times in 8 months!!

It doesn't end there, unfortunately! Insurance does not pay to repair whatever broke, just the damage from whatever results. So when I called to have the dishwasher repairman come by, we have to pay for that. And of course, the warranty expired in February. He came on Friday, found the problem, couldn't come back until this past Friday due to his schedule, to put in the part. When he came, he got the dishwasher all pulled out from the under-counter space, he said, "uh-oh," which are words you definitely don't want ANY repairman saying!

I walked over there and looked, and behind the dishwasher was MOLD!!! Black, ugly, stinky, highly allergenic MOLD. The cabinet back was wet and gross besides being moldy, the floor was moldy and the sidewalls of the cabinet-inside were wet.

I called the adjustor and he said the restoration guy would come out. He came out and told me the dishwasher could not be put back, that the mold needed to be cleaned up and the cabinets dried out. So now the dishwasher is fixed but doesn't WORK!!! It's now sitting in the floor of the kitchen, completely in the way, and I am STILL washing dishes by hand, going on 2 weeks now. That's really an interesting thing with 6 people in the house!

The moral of this story is: DO NOT start your dishwasher before you go to bed or before you leave the house or while you're gone. I won't ever do it again, ever!