Um…Very Very Bad

So take this as a warning.

Never put beanbag type pillows in the washer. I tempted Fate one too many times on that one, and she finally bit me in the ass.

Last night I put CootieBoy’s squooshy Spider-Man pillow in the washer with a bunch of towels. One hour later I opened to door to find tens of thousands of tiny little white balls covering everything inside the washer. TENS of THOUSANDS. I found the pillow – thankfully only about 1/4 of the filling was gone. The hole? The side of a small pencilhead eraser.

I contemplated the situation briefly, and decided to run the load again, sans pillow, to see if it would wash away the pellets. One cycle later – nope. Same amount of tiny white pellets. That’s the only bad thing about front-loading washers. LESS WATER. Which, I know, is the best thing about front-loading washers. But last night I sure wished I had a 10-year old top loader that I could load up to the rim with water to try and rinse away those pellets.

I contemplated briefly again, but since it was now near midnight, my tired mind couldn’t process, and so I put the towels in the dryer to sit overnight. I then ran the washer while completely empty, hoping it would wash the pellets away. Went to bed as the cycle began.

Came down this morning to find the inside of the washer just as covered in tiny pellets as the night before. And without even thinking about the consequences I started the dryer. Ten minutes later I checked the dryer and found – voila – the pellets were removing themselves from the towels. Yay! Checked another 10 minutes later and pulled out the dryer vent. Only about an inch of the dryer vent had pellets. Hm…where were they all going? I closed the dryer and started it up again.

Denis figured it out about ten minutes after that. He went to take the trash out to find little pellets flying from the outside vent onto our back patio. Christmas snow in June! Only it’s the bad kind that kills the ozone layer (if you believe that sort of thing)!

It was only then that I realized the ramifications of what I had just done. I had spent the past thirty minutes of the drying cycle blowing little bits of possibly-flammable-in-the-future pellets into my dryer vent tubing. Which is inside a wall. In my HOUSE. In NoNJ it would have been easy – the tubing went from our laundry area to the garage to the ouside. We could have ripped out the tubing and replaced it completely. But not so in our 10-yr-old house where they put in an interior laundry room (which I’ll never have again after this experience).

Fortunately, they have dryer duct cleaning systems which you can use to clean out lint from your dryer vent system. And they are relatively cheap – $50 for the kit, which is cheaper than hiring a guy from Sears to come and do the same thing with that very same piece of equipment. So I’ll be using the giftcard my mom recently gave me to buy said dryer vent cleaning system. And I look at it positively – chances are slim the previous owners ever cleaned out the vents (their laziness witnessed by the amazing grime found in our ovens upon moving in), so it’s possible that we’ll be cleaning out 10 years worth of lint from the tubing, as well as those stupid little pellets.

But I still wonder how in the heck I’m supposed to get them out of the washer.