woman in the dunes, or how I cleaned the dryer

I'm not going to post pictures of what I found, because it makes me too mad. The previous owners were unclean. We know that. Because we know that, we move aside appliances and brush out 15 years worth of dust and cat hair and sweep up piles of kid toy pieces. We dislike this job, but we do it.

I decided to clean the vent under the dryer filter. I thought I had tackled the job when the contractors were here fixing the 15 years of dry rot caused by a leaking shower (yes, in the laundry room) and the dryer was out and available for me to scrub the vent. Not so.

I removed the lint trap, and started to brush out the mounds of lint. The texture was odd, though. It felt...sandy. I got a flashlight, and sure enough, there was a thick layer of sand mixed in with the lint, coating the vent. I pulled about a quarter cup out with the brush and swabbed at the vent with wet paper towels. Then I saw the mounds of sand at the bottom of the vent, inside the dryer.

There was a whole frickin' beach in there. I have bona fide SoCal street cred, and I know from beach sand.

I can imagine a family returning from the beach with sandy towels. You've been there, right? You shake out the towels, wash them, then dry them.

But not so in the Phillips family. Why bother with the first two steps when you can just dry the wet towels? I mean, they're wet already, right?



After folding the bendable dryer brush in all sorts of creative ways and loosening all the sandy lint along the vent, I sucked all the remaining sand up with our vaccuum hose attachment. If you don't have one of these dryer brushes, BUY ONE! They are currently stocked in Marshall's and Ross for a fraction of the retail price.

Having cleared the sand dunes, I then went outside to clean the vent access on the house. The vent flapper is, as everything plastic is in this house, broken. It's missing one of the flaps. So I went to Home Depot, bought a new vent cover, a cold air stopper vent attachment of dubious worth, and a rodent/bird keeper-outer cage cover thing for the vent cap.



As usual, not knowing what I was doing, I thought I'd do some after-the-fact research. I may return all of the above purchases and exchange them for one of these, a combo unit that promises to stop cold air, keep out various pests, and furthermore, will not blow dryery sand air directly on my car. I'd say that's worth $20. It is, right?