So I did what any other retired technician would do. I disassembled the washing machine to the point where I could reach down inside and push the manual unlock button and open the door. That turned out to be quite a chore in itself but I got the door open and pulled the wet clothes out to dry.

Then I had to figure out whether I had a electronic door switch failure or a main computer board. In the process of looking into that, I remembered that I had a three year extended warranty on that machine, along with my clothes dryer. Then it was time to contact the warranty company on a Saturday afternoon. That's when the nightmare started.

If any of you readers have ever had to deal with an extended warranty company to get them to come out and repair something, you probably know what I'm going to say here. It took me three different people before I finally reached someone who could start a claim and a repair ticket. Then they told me, via email, that they would be sending me some parts. At that time, since I had already told them to just send me a door switch, I would be receiving a small package the following week. Oh no, they sent me everything but the kitchen sink for the technician to make the simple repair. There was no door switch.

So I emailed them and asked them once again to send me a door switch, which they replied that they would get one right out. Then I got another email telling me that my appointment for Wednesday to do the repairs was being pushed out to Friday because of the parts issue.

I got mad and went on Amazon, ordered a door switch and had them send it overnight. It arrived Wednesday afternoon. Since Wednesday's are my podcast days, I put off the repair until Thursday.

Thursday dawned and, after breakfast and my morning chores, I got to work to replace the door switch. Which, for someone like me, should have been fairly easy. I've replaced many switches like this on front load clothes washers in the past. But noooooo, it wasn't so easy. By the time I got the door open again, and replace the switch, I was up to my elbows in secondary problems. Which made the job take much longer than it should have.

Once I finally got the machine back together and turned back on, I started testing things. That's when the error codes started to show on the panel. I tried everything, and decided that enough was enough. We washed the now overloaded dirty laundry that had been piling up for nearly two weeks by now, and I worked around the error codes to get three loads of clothes washed.

Today the warranty technician showed up and I told him my background, and the codes I had been receiving. He checked things out, and sure enough, at the end of a short test cycle, the door fault code showed up. Since he was able to get the door open using the control panel, we determined that the door switch was good. The washer just needed a new main control board. Which he replaced, as that was one of the parts the warranty company sent out ahead of time. So, all is good with that one. But that wasn't the only house repair issue I had to deal with this last week.

Last weekend, while helping my wife outside with her flower gardens, I noticed some pieces of asphalt roof shingle laying on the sidewalk to the front door. When I looked up at the roof, I noticed several loose shingles laying up there, and since we had just had a severe thunderstorm the previous week, it was obvious that the high winds had tore off some shingles. I have an old roof that has needed changing for a while now but that job would cost me out of pocket, in the neighbourhood of ten to twenty thousand dollars if I had to pay for it.

I learned my lesson the previous year with the frozen water pipe, and I immediately called my homeowners insurance company to see what my options were. Another episode of being handed off to multiple people until I finally landed with someone who would fill out the claim. Now I have to wait until next week for an estimator to come and talk to me about whether  have enough shingle damage to warrant a new roof.