This weekend we had a great plan all setup. My mother was supposed to come from Arizona for my sister's 50th birthday. We were going to drive up to the motherland, beautiful Virginia, for a getaway weekend. Sometimes you just cannot plan for the chain of events that occur.
Last weekend I took our van to get the oil changed and in anticipation of the big weekend I wanted to be all set. I told the Meineke man that I had seen stains on the driveway and to make sure the leaks did not come from our van. When I checked back in with him after an hour, he showed me how the radiator had a crack in it. I asked for a quote on the work and he said $850. That was odd to me since a couple of years ago I had the radiator fixed in my son's car for $400. I immediately went to a good friend who has his own car mechanic shop and asked him to check it for me. He told me I was the first person to complain about the high price at Meineke and he would find out the cost and get back with me on Monday. Sure enough, he quoted a little over $400. Since I was taking off from work on Friday, we scheduled that day for van radiator overhaul knowing I would be all set for the weekend trip to Virginia. One other odd thing about radiators... In the good old days you could fix radiators by pouring a solution into them and it would clog the small leaks in no time. These days of advanced technology, radiators are plastic, which means if the crack you have to replace them. When you get a crack the cold to hot temperature changes make them fail even faster. Sounds like progress to me. Except for the fact that plastic is lighter, but then again our van gets 14 miles/gallon, so I am not sure that lighter radiator is helping.
On Tuesday night my mother called and said she saw the forecast for ice and snow and extremely low temperatures and cancelled her flight. Which was pretty disappointing, but she had a cold recently and was afraid the cold might trigger more sickness. Our well intended plans were starting to fall apart.
On Wednesday our dishwasher stopped working. We had this same thing happen a couple of years ago and when I tried to find someone to fix it, they all told me to forget it as the dishwashers are self contained and it was cheaper to buy a new one that fix an existing one. And guess what? The dishwasher is plastic! Two plastic failures in the same week. We let the completely full dishwasher sit, until Friday. I took off the water line to check to make sure the water was flowing, which it was, so it was indeed the motor inside the plastic housing. I turned off the hot water shutoff value and sat down to read the newspaper. My daughter came down to cook her morning eggs and yelled to me to come over as water was flowing on the kitchen floor. I opened the cabinets under the sink and saw a lake had formed, which I cleaned up quickly. I thought that was odd, but checked the hot water line and it was indeed off. I left the find a new water hose, just in case the one had a leak in it. The odd thing was the length from the hot water line to the dishwasher was 10 feet. They only make dishwasher cords in 4 and 6 foot lengths. It took 4 stores to find the connections I needed to get it to work with a 10 foot ice maker cord. When I got back my daughter again told me a flood was happening in the kitchen. I checked the hot water shutoff value again and this time being wiser, I turned on the sink faucet cold water and saw water pouring out of the hot water dishwasher connection, which was plastic of course, connected to a PVC plastic water line. The custom builder who built our house liked to make sure everything was custom built!
On Saturday morning we picked up our fixed van for the bargain price of $420 and thanks to our corrupt Meineke shop, my friend had made some money. Since snow and ice were in the weather forecast we put off our trip to Virginia for one more day. Now that we had a van we could go find a new dishwasher. My wife and I checked every store we could find as we typically like to buy scratch-n-dent or discontinued high ticket items. We found a high end model normally selling for $498 which was marked down to $298, which was cheaper than almost any other one we could find. We brought it home and when I tried to install it I found that the connectors I got the day before were not right. Off to my favorite home improvement store as there was a plumber who worked there who had always helped me in the past. He fixed me up and by 8:30pm last night I had the dishwasher working. The place we bought it said the really high end dishwashers are stainless steel and are very quiet, we chose the quiet plastic model because of cost!
This morning we woke up to my daughter vomiting, which she has continued for 3 hours. Sounds like that seals our Virginia plans. What sounded like such a good idea has not worked out and we are $750 poorer as well. What a week!
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