A New Clothes Dryer With an Amish Influence

This morning, my dryer gave out. The motor has been overheating and squawking for the past few days and I chalked it up to the frigid air shooting down the vent and frosting up the insides of the mechanism. However, it shuts off frequently and won't restart until the motor cools down. Denial over. It's broken.

Since it would be cheaper to purchase a decent used dryer than to buy parts for this one, I'm shopping on Craigslist, which is an experience in itself. It's a little bit like standing in line in Phy-Ed class in elementary school waiting to be chosen. I send e-mails and make phone calls and each time, I'm either ignored, or I get, "Sorry, someone else took it." So, I start the process all over again. I AM going to find a dryer. And fortunately, I just found a buyer for our old portable dishwasher and that will likely fund the "new" dryer purchase...that and the price my husband will get at the metal recycling place for the demolished pieces of the old dryer.

In the meantime, my husband came up with a new clothes dryer. It involves a wood stove and a box fan.

We've heated the family room (which used to the the sanctuary of our church house) to 80-something degrees, strung up a bunch of lines, and plugged in a box fan to move the air around. Voila! An Amish inspired clothes dryer...except they wouldn't have the box fan. And their clothes would probably smell like kerosene from the lamps.

 Kind of reminds me of the way the house looked in the Hee-Haw segment I used to watch when I was a kid. The wife was missing teeth and had rollers in her hair. Whew! At least we haven't gone that far down hill. Yet.

 The sheets actually billowed in the breeze...as the deer looked on. Sounds a lot more quaint than it was, as you can see.

Hmm...maybe we should make this a permanent thing and skip shopping on Craigslist.  Or not.