Free Dishwasher!

As anyone who has been reading this blog, or listening to me rant about how busy I've been all summer, or someone willing to do both (does such a person exist?), knows, my husband and I bought our first home this summer.

This home came with an extra, apparently functional, dishwasher that we can't give away! For free!

Here's how all of this came about.

When we were still in the initial phases of looking at our (now) home and making offers, etc., there was a bunch of stuff in the garage covered with sheets and tarps. For those of you who haven't just spent the last six months looking for a house, this is fairly normal. Usually, before a house is actually put on the market, the homeowners do things to make it more sellable, like paint the walls white, do minor repairs and upgrades, and move out extra stuff that just makes the place look cluttered and unfriendly. So we didn't really think anything of the stuff in the garage.

We made an offer, after some negotiating it was accepted, blah, blah, blah, and the seller had a garage sale. And we went out of town to celebrate our anniversary. We didn't think anything of the dishwasher in the corner of the garage covered with a brown towel.

Now, I'm not sure if the seller forgot about the dishwasher in the corner of the garage covered in the brown towel, or if it simply didn't sell in the garage sale, but we, I should say "I" didn't think anything of it when we returned to do our final walk-through after the garage sale, and perhaps my husband didn't either, because there were still a few random odds and ends in the house that were due to be picked up by the seller. Presumably the dishwasher fell into this category? Ahhh, but it didn't.

The seller wrote us a nice little letter about how she enjoyed growing up in the house...yadda yadda yadda...and that she hoped we enjoyed it as much as she had, and that the dishwasher in the garage worked and matched the oven.

WHAT???

My first idea was that, as the washer and dryer were already in the garage, why don't we just hook the dishwasher up, too? That way we'd have two dishwashers, and wouldn't that be great for all of the parties that I'm planning to throw now that we actually have space in which to party? This notion quickly made it onto my husband's list of "Why my Wife is a Nutjob," although I think two dishwashers is perfectly reasonable if you have a lot of dishes, which we do.

So the next step was Father Joe's Villages, which, if you're not familiar with them, is basically an organization that takes stuff you don't need and gives it to the needy, or auctions it off and uses the funds to help the needy. I'm sure you could dig a little deeper into their website and find out that I'm probably a bit off, but for my purposes, for a $10 donation per trip, they'll come and pick up the stuff you don't want. The $10 donation is to cover the cost of fuel, and is a more than fair price, in my mind, to get rid of stuff that I don't want, and to possibly help someone else in the process. Yes, they take dishwashers. No, they won't take ours because ours doesn't have wheels.

This alone is not enough to deter us from trying to give away a purportedly working dishwasher. We posted it on freecycle, the yahoo group which aims to keep otherwise good stuff (like our dishwasher) out of landfills. We received a number of responses, none of which panned out, mostly because our dishwasher is not white. Riiight...did we say it's FREE!

Next on our list was Goodwill, which informed me that they don't take dishwashers. Then we tried Habitat for Humanity, which may or may not take our dishwasher, as it has to be a model from the last five years. I can't even ballpark how old it is, so this might take some legwork. My husband was going to post it on Craig's list, so maybe that'll work out. If no one comes and takes it by the time my husband heads over to the landfill with the remains of a mysterious shrub-cum-tree plant thingy residing in the corner of the yard to which he plans on taking a chainsaw (despite it's pretty purple flowers, of which there are exactly two), then the perfectly good, presumably working dishwasher is going with them.

So if anyone out there knows anyone who could use a dishwasher, please let me know! I have a FREE one!