Sometimes a mess is good news

Somehow I've managed to accumulate a mountain of laundry. You know, with seven people in the house it's easy to do. The three oldest (17, 12 and 10) are in charge of their own laundry. It stays separate in their hampers in their rooms and they wash and it then get it put away (sometimes with some folding help from mom.) So, that really helps out. However, they still dirty towels and sheets and then there's the laundry for the other four of us. Plus, someone had passed on some bags of clothes to us and I had all those to wash.

Anyway, I've been trying to get the 8-year-old started on helping with the laundry. Usually, it's carrying baskets up and down the stairs and transferring the clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. The other day I asked him to throw in a load. He did. Not a full load -- his idea of a load was three pieces of clothing. Anyway, a little while later my teen says, "Mom, you better go downstairs and look. There's bubbles all over the floor."

I went down to take a look and indeed, suds were everywhere. It appeared to be leaking from the door on the front loading washer. Suds oozed out and covered the laundry room floor. Passed on the news to hubby who figured he'd have to go get a new door seal and replace it. The week before I thought I'd seen a little stream drip out and he had it on his to-do list already to check it out. We both figured that the seal had totally given out.

Fast forward a couple hours and I am downstairs cleaning up. I look at the bottle of laundry detergent I had purchased the night before. It was almost empty. Turned out my 8-year-old wasn't quite sure how much to put in or accidentally dumped in way too much. I still haven't gotten him to fess up completely to what happened. I was just relieved that the problem was about 28 ounces of liquid to wash three garments vs. a failed door seal that had to be fixed immediately before any further laundering could be done. I was glad to learn that the mess was due to an accident, not another costly pressing repair that had to be taken care of. I ran another load. No suds, no leak. Thank God it was just a one-time mess!