I woke up this morning around 5am and stumbled toward the kitchen. Even in my groggy state, I noticed that our house smelled exceptionally fresh and clean. It was quite refreshing. As I rounded the corner to enter the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks and cleared my eyes. Sure enough, there was a puddle of water about 1/4″ thick coming from under the laundry room door and into the small bathroom next to it.
I immediately assumed that the washer had flooded. Either the drain hose had become detached, one of the water lines sprung a leak, or, perhaps, the washer itself overfilled with water. I opened the door and surveyed the damage. There was no water leaking at that time, nothing spraying into the air, and no dripping sounds. Then I realized that the washer wasn’t running when I went to bed last night, so it couldn’t be an overflowed washer or a fallen drain hose. Regardless, it needed to be mopped up.
I grabbed an armful of towels and dropped one into the water and started mopping it up. That’s when I realized it wasn’t water. No… it was laundry soap. Somehow, the giant industrial sized container of super-concentrated laundry soap had fallen off of the dryer in the middle of the night. To make matters worse, the vent cap also fell off it is causing its contents to leak out onto the floor. I grabbed a mop and a bucket of water and started trying to clean up the mess. The problem is, how do you clean soap? I mean… it’s soap. The more you wipe it up the messier it gets,
After an hour and a half of mopping (and replacing the water in the bucket over and over again since it was becoming too saturated with soap, I decided I’d have to give up and finish the rest of the work tonight. The visible soap on the floor appears to be clean, the floor looks dry. However, getting it even slightly wet results in a sudsy, slippery mess, so it’s obviously not all gone. Additionally, I didn’t have the time to move the washer and dryer out of the laundry room to clean underneath them so, despite my efforts to at least make it look clean, soap from under the washer and dryer oozed back onto the floor within minutes.
I had been meaning to mop the floor anyway, I just hadn’t planned on doing it at five o’clock on a Monday morning. Thankfully, I cleaned the laundry room yesterday. So at least I don’t have to deal with a giant pile of clothes being covered in soap that will never rinse out. Then again, perhaps, had the laundry still been there, it would have cushioned the fall of the laundry detergent container, and therefore, either kept the cap from coming off entirely, or held the container in a more upright position to cause less to leak out.
*sigh*
