One thing I haven’t written about explicitly in this blog, because I don’t want everyone to hate me, is that Sir Monkeypants has been at home full-time since the Wee One was born. Since I’m a stay-at-home mom, he has something like 35 weeks of parental leave covered by EI. We can’t afford that kind of leave, but his workplace offers a fairly generous top-up for 10 weeks, so he took all that time, plus used all the vacation he hasn’t taken in the past two years (I knew staying chained to the house would pay off someday!). So the end result is that he’s been home all this time, and still has another whole month off, and in total will have been able to spend more than 3 1/2 months helping the Captain and Gal Smiley make the transition to the new baby and new schools. Don’t hate me!

We were really lucky that he was home for the first six weeks after the Wee One was born, because due to my C-section, I couldn’t really do anything around the house, and he had to do it all — the cooking, the cleaning, the taking of kids to the park. But once I was able to help out around the house a little more, he was able to implement his real plan for the summer — working on our house.

Our house is nice and new so it didn’t require a lot of upkeep kind of work, so that leaves us free to do other planning and organizing type work. We’ve organized the basement and done some painting and completed some little repairs. We’ve hung pictures and cleaned out closets and decided that no matter how hard we try, we are just never going to be able to get both cars into the garage again.

The big project, though, is our laundry room/mud room. It’s the main entry point to the house for the kids — coming in through the garage. It’s a very small room that contains our massive washer and dryer set (able to hold 16 pairs of jeans!), some overhead cabinets, some wall hooks, and a small closet. We’ve tried our best to organize it, but it’s always just jam-packed with knapsacks and diaper bags, hats and scarves, coats and boots, and baskets of laundry. As the kids grow up, we want them to have a place to put their coat and bag, so it all stays organized, but the mud room just does not have that kind of flexibility as it is right now.

So, Sir Monkeypants got the brilliant idea to stack our washer and dryer. The room is really tall (9-foot ceiling) and there is so much vertical space we are not using — the stacking will enable us to free up almost half the floor space in the room. Then, we’ll use the free space to put in a bench, with a hat and gloves bin for each kid underneath on a shelf, and space underneath that for shoes or boots. Above the bench, we’ll hang a hat rack with dozens of hooks and bins for us to keep our keys, wallets, and our own hats and gloves. A shelf above that will hold the laundry soap. Meanwhile, we took all the off-season coats out of the little closet and moved them to other closets in the house, and filled the whole closet space with shelving — half for backpacks, half for extra shoes.

Everything was going great and we were so excited, until it came to the stacking part. Our washer and dryer can definitely be stacked, but usually people choose to do it when the appliances are installed. Ours are almost three years old, so we had to book a technician to come in and do it for us. After being turned away by most of the appliance places in town, we finally just bit the bullet and booked it with Whirlpool, the makers of our machines.

At first, when we called for a quote, we were told it would cost $77. Then we called back to ask more questions, and found out that it would actually cost $250 — $77 is for a regular service call, but $250 is the special price for the stacking. Then we called back to actually book it, and found out that $250 is the minimum amount. Any extra work of any nature will lead to additional charges. We have a gas dryer, so with the stacking, the venting will need to be replaced — extra change. We want to flip the door on the dryer — extra charge (although, Sir Monkeypants decided to take this on himself, and won the battle). We also have pedestals under our washer and dryer, custom-fit pieces to elevate them, and these will have to be removed, so — extra charge.

The very nice young man on the phone who booked our visit warned us that all these things will be charged over top of the $250. But! He cannot tell us how much each extra item will cost. He cannot give us a bottom line price. We just have to pay whatever the guys who come to do the work say it is, when they are done.

By booking the visit, we have committed to paying whatever the final price is. And also! If for any reason the stacking cannot be completed — i.e. missing a part, not enough room, whatever — you still have to pay the $250.

Trust me, we really, really tried to get someone else to come do this for us. But no one was remotely interested in touching our system.

And by the time we called to book the appointment, we’d already ripped out the cabinets in the laundry room, and purchased and assembled the bench and hat rack, installed the shelves in the closet and painted the walls. There was definitely no going back.

So, some guys are coming on Thursday. To possibly stack our washer/dryer. And they will charge us some random amount, no less than $250 but probably much, much more.

At a time, I may point out, when not as much money is coming into the house as usual.

It better be worth it, dammit!