Sometimes the dishes get a little piled up. I usually wash them a couple times a day, but on this day, I let them go over night. In the morning I decided that I’d just run them in the dishwasher. Usually, I hate the dishwasher – you have to rinse them prior to loading, then wait and then check them over and rewash the several dirty ones the dishwasher missed. It’s like doing dishes three times instead of once.

Anyway, we were out of dishwasher detergent. I knew that you couldn’t use regular dish soap, so I did some research online and found that you could use laundry soap with a bit of white vinegar.

So that’s what I did.

About thirty minutes later, I start to smell plastic burning. I went over to the kitchen to see what it was. The floor was covered in suds! Clearly the laundry soap/vinegar cocktail didn’t work!

I figured that the suds were somehow frying the dishwasher, making a burned plastic smell. I put that on the back burner and grabbed a few towels. While on my hands and knees and after my third towel, I thought “hey! I don’t need to do this! I have a shopvac!”

So I grabbed the shopvac and quickly sucked up the suds. After the initial suds were gone, a lot of water was still on the floor. It had seeped behind the stove and the fridge.

Then I did something that I had always feared, the thing that all good nightmares are made out of. I moved both the stove and the fridge, exposing the horror that lived behind my appliances.

The fridge was dusty, which was actually muddy due to the flooding. But around the stove was like a warzone. Bit of spaghetti, popcorn and tofu littered the floorscape. Drippings of sauces and chaunces, oil mixed with spices and seeds had found new refuge between the fridge and stove.

The Shopvac made quick work of it all and I left the appliances out for awhile so that floor could try. I emptied over a half gallon of water from the vacuum. There was a half gallon of water on my floor, dumped by my dishwasher because I put too much soap into it. You’d think that they’d have an overflow drain designed for such things.

Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea for the overflow to go all over the floor? Wouldn’t it be simple to just hook something up to the same drain that’s already hooked up to the same dishwasher? How is that not easier?

Oh, as for the burned plastic smell, it was an oddly unrelated casualty of my attempt to avoid more work. The plastic collar of the blender fell under the racks in the dishwasher, contacting the heating element and melting big time. No smoothies until the postman brings a new part.

Due to my laziness (and let’s face it, dishwashers were invented for lazy people who are somehow convinced that it would save them time) I had to clean soap suds and a half gallon of water off the floor.

Today, I’m going back to doing the dishes the old fashioned way. In the end, it’s much less work.