Another laundry lesson learnt.

If you've read any of my posts before, you might recall a small incident involving my washing machine, a load of washed sheets and a washing machine door that refused to open.  In case you haven't read it, or would like to refresh your memory, or maybe you're just one of those people who finds that reading about the misfortunes of others makes you feel better about your own sorry lot, then you can find that post right here.

In my defence I will say of today's incident, that for the last couple of years I have been recycling the water from my washing machine, via a greywater hose connected to the outlet pipe.  So for a couple of years, I have not had to consider the possibility of an overflowing laundry sink or a flooded laundry floor.  Until today.  This is what I get for cleaning out the fernery.

You see, the greywater hose connects to the washing machine's outlet pipe, passes through the window above the washing machine, travels across the fernery floor and makes its' way out to the garden where it keeps my lawns lush.  Well, that's what usually happens.  Until today.

The fernery, well it used to be a fernery until it got piled up with a whole load of other un-fernery related stuff, had been getting a bit messy.  Well, to be honest, 'a bit messy' is kind of an understatement.  It had gotten so bad that I couldn't walk right through it without having to take very big steps to avoid stepping on something and even then it was chancey.  It had gotten so bad that I was embarrassed to invite people over because they would not be able to avoid seeing my poor, sad fernery that used to be quite lovely, as they came in the back door.

Over time, this un-fernery related stuff that had been stored there by a friend for a few weeks which turned into, oh, about 13 months not that I'm counting, had spread out as boxes were opened in a search for one thing or another and had been added to with more boxes and bags of stuff.  Boxes had split and contents had tumbled out across the concrete floor.  Thinking that surely this friend would soon be taking this stuff away, as it was very clearly becoming a nuisance and really, it had been way more than just a few weeks, and thinking also that this friend should take care of their own stuff and not rely on me to clean up the mess their stuff had created, I left it there in it's state of messy mess-ness.  Time passed.  More time passed.  Yet more time passed.  Hints were given.  Suggestions were openly made. Begging is not my style.  The mess remained.

About a week ago, it became apparent that work needed to be done along the outside west wall of the house. Stay with me.  This is relevant because, to get to the aforementioned outside west wall of the house, one must pass through the fernery.  Yup.  Visions of tradesmen stumbling over these piles, muttering to themselves that they couldn't believe anyone could live like this troubled me terribly.  (If you ever hear me say that I don't care about any one's opinion of me, please know that I am lying).  It was also a fairly real possibility that no self-respecting tradesman would bother stepping through all of that and would instead turn on their tradie booted heels, get back into their tradie ute and be on their tradie way.  If the work was to be done, as it must be, the mess had to be dealt with.

So I spent one of my precious afternoons re-packing and re-stacking boxes and bags, sorting out rubbish that had accumulated throughout all of it and sweeping up piles of accumulated dried leaves that had dropped from the passionfruit vine growing over the fernery.  There was now a clear pathway for the tradesmen, room to park the pram and space for the children to store their bikes out of the rain.  And the piles of un-fernery related stuff looked even tidier than when it had all been dumped there in the first place.  What joy there is in a relatively tidy room / fernery.

This is where we get back to the laundry debacle of the morning.  If you are still there.  Underneath the piles and piles of stuff, the greywater hose had been lying all that time, quietly and conscientiously carrying the washing machine water out to the lawn, never asking for attention, never complaining, even though it now had a split and was leaking water onto the floor.  Being a small split and not a great big flooding split, it had managed to go unnoticed underneath everything.  Now that it was uncovered and found to be leaving a watermark on the concrete floor it seemed wise to disconnect it from the washing machine outlet, leaving the greywater to go into the sink and straight down the pipe.  As I said earlier, "until today".

What happened today?  Today I decided to hand wash some woollen jumpers.  Normally I do this in a big plastic tub that is perfect for just this very job.  But the plastic tub is currently otherwise employed, holding all the paraphernalia that one picks up from the floor of an eight year old boy's bedroom floor.  That is a whole other story which I will not go into now because probably you've got other things to do than just sit here reading my tale of woe.  Suffice it to say that the plastic tub I would normally use was not available for service at that particular point in time.  So I put the plug in the laundry sink, half filled it with water and a dash of wool wash, put the woolly jumpers in, swished them about a bit and left them to soak while I made breakfast for the troops.  If I had thought about it for even half a moment, I would have realised that the water from the load of washing I had put on five minutes earlier would also soon be making it's merry way into the laundry sink and there might be a problem with that.  But no.  I went off to the kitchen, feeling good about having a load of washing in the machine and a tub of soaking woolly jumpers, all done before breakfast.

There are days when I hear the voice of  Forrest Gump's mother in my head saying "Stupid is as stupid does".  Unfortunately the voice does not come into my head until after I've done something stupid!  Otherwise things might go quite differently for me and I might not find a laundry sink that just can't take any more and a laundry floor covered in water.  Worst of all was the fact that my lovingly hand knitted, hand washed woollies were now sitting in an overflowing sink of water that had been through the washing machine and a load of dirty clothes and did not look like the kind of water I wanted to be washing my woollies in.  Pull the plug out frantically, spilling more water onto the floor in the process, not that it matters because a bit more is not going to make much difference at this point.  Retrieve my precious woollies, wash them out in a bucket that is not quite so perfect for this very job, hang them out, hang the rest of the washing out, make myself a stiff cup of tea and spend the rest of the day chiding myself for not having the backbone to tell my friend plain and clear that the stuff in the fernery needs to be gone; for being so completely disorganised that I don't have the right tub for the job even though said tub has been in my son's room keeping heaven knows what off the floor for two weeks and should, by rights, have been where I needed it by this morning and finally, for being too hard on myself and for chiding myself for something that could, kind of, happen to anyone.  Except to those who have a backbone and a plastic tub that is perfect for the job and available at the time of need.  Oh to be one of those people.