Good Samaritans

As I was getting ready to leave the house yesterday morning, I heard a knock on the door. I peeked out to find some random tattooed man on the door step. It turned out to be a guy Matt met a few days ago. This man, Jerry, cleans out foreclosed houses and is then able to sell some of the items he finds. Matt had asked him to look for a black dishwasher since ours has not worked in a while. Jerry came to let us know that he has found a black dishwasher and would like to bring it by so we can take a look at it. We decide that he should call Matt and set up a time. Jerry leaves.

About 3 minutes later I go to the garage to open the door, let Lucy out and be on my way. I open the garage door to find that the big metal garage door is already open. I ask Matt if he had opened it and he says no. So...it was open all night. We looked around and didn't think anything was missing. Shwew! However, I noticed that the garage door was a little sideways. I told Matt to pull his car out and I pulled mine out too. I pulled the red cord and let the garage door down manually. As it came down it was very sideways...so we stopped and regrouped. We noticed that the cable on the left side had come unwound. As we were assessing the situation, Jerry and his friend walked up the driveway and asked if we needed help. It just so happened that Jerry used to put up garage doors. In a matter of 30 minutes Jerry and his friend had fixed the entire thing! As he walked back down the driveway, Matt said, "Wait, what do we owe you?" and Jerry replied, "Oh, nothing, it was no trouble, have a good day!"

So...last night Jerry came by again to show us the new dishwasher. We thought it looked good, it was the same dimensions, and it was a higher voltage (or something.) Jerry tried to help us unhook the old dishwasher so he could take it with him (Isn't he nice?) but the valve under the sink would not turn off. So we put the new dishwasher in the garage....and Jerry left.

When our neighbor, Wayne, came home around 9:00, he thought it would be super easy to install, so we (we, meaning Wayne and Matt...Allison and I sat at the kitchen table and created baby shower invitations for a friend at school...) pulled out the old dishwasher and brought the new one in! Bad idea. Apparently, the copper wire did not connect properly and caused a leak under the dishwasher. We needed a new flex hose to connect the dishwasher to the valve under the sink to avoid the leaking. After a late night trip to Wal-mart, we discovered they do not sell flex hoses. Since the valve under the sink was not turning off, the only way to avoid an all night leak was to turn the water off to the entire house until we could get a new flex hose this morning. You don't realize how often you use water until you are without it for 8 hours.

Matt set his alarm clock for 5:30 so he could be at Lowe's when it opened. He was back a little after 6:30, the flex hose was installed, water was turned on and there were no leaks by 7:00. Matt wanted to turn the dishwasher on to see if it worked, but I think waiting until he gets back from Iowa will be just fine. I'd rather not be stuck with leaks, fire, flooding, burning, broken, or anything else without Matt. I would hate for him to miss out on the fun!

Matt is leaving for Iowa tonight and will be back on Tuesday morning. Hopefully we will be able to check out the dishwasher and I'll give y'all an update!

(People like Jerry don't come around very often. We are very thankful that he was around yesterday morning. He saved us a lot of time, trouble and money. We now have his number just in case!)

We are also very thankful for people like Wayne and Allison! We are very thankful to have them as friends...and it doesn't hurt that Allison is crafty while Wayne is an amazing handy man!)