10 Steps to Managing a Flooding Washing Machine, Without Totally Losing your Sanity

After a chaotic month of relationship changes and moving into a new apartment, I’d finally unpacked all my possessions and was sitting down with a nice cold beer. Ahh, I thought to myself. Finally a chance to relax and unwind.

That’s when I noticed an oozing puddle of water creeping from underneath my bedroom door, like the protagonist from a 50′s horror film. Believing this to be rather odd, I hesitantly opened the door. My stomach fell when I realised my washing machine had flooded and destroyed my entire apartment with ankle-deep water. After I’d opened the door, it began gushing throughout the entire house.

I won’t lie to you. At that point, the damage looked so impossible to clean up, I strongly considered walking out of the house and… okay, so I didn’t have a very good Step Two in that plan. But I did learn a lot of things very quickly – like mentioning to your mum that you’ve got a “plumbing problem” means she’ll initially assume you’re suffering from a urinary tract infection.

In case you ever find yourself with a flooded washing machine as well, here’s 10 steps to follow to manage everything quickly and easily:

Step 1: Quickly unplug any electricals which may be susceptible to the water. In particular, check for things like power boards which may be sitting on the floor. Gaffa tape electrical plugs to the walls if you don’t have anywhere to put them very easily. Oh yeah, and turn off the bloody washing machine taps, if you haven’t already done so.

Step 2: Call a mate. Everything becomes much more manageable when you’ve got a close bud helping you out. You’ll probably completely lose your wobbly voice and overflow into sobbing when you call someone (THIS MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE HAPPENED TO ME), but it helps to have someone helping you – especially if the damage is pretty bad. My ex was a bloody good sport and came over to help, in my case.

Step 3: Sandbag the flow of water as best you can. Create a border of towels, clothing, soft toys, anything at hand which is washable and absorbent. Don’t worry about dirtying everything up, you can wash it all later. If those advertisements for sanitary pads are to believed, throwing a single Stayfree pad into the water should see all the water absorbed within seconds. That said, I didn’t have any feminine hygiene products on hand at the time, so I can’t guarantee how well this works.

Step 4: Move anything else off the ground out of the water. You should be pleasantly surprised to find that the water damage isn’t that bad. Think about it – how many of your possessions do you actually store on the ground? Hopefully most of your stuff is located on shelves and off the carpet. That said, now’s the time to move everything out of the damage area and get ready to clean up.

Step 5: Apologise to your downstairs neighbour in advance. If you do have neighbours, suck it up, go downstairs and let them know what’s going on. They will have water seeping through their light fittings or ceiling, and it’s better you reach out in advance to apologise rather than them get upset and visit you. The elderly may believe they’ve been cursed with an indoor thunderstorm, and you don’t want that on your conscience. They’ll appreciate the warning and may even offer to help clean up the mess.

Step 6: Turn off the bloody heater! If you’ve used a heater to try to dry out any of the water, don’t. Especially if you’ve got wood parquetry flooring. I will show you why later in the post.

Step 7: Clean up the water as best you can. Unsurprisingly, you can’t use your vacuum cleaner to hoover up the water – sounds obvious, but a dumbarse mate of mine shorted out his vacuum trying to do this. Hopefully, by this stage, your friend has arrived to help you out. The water cleanup will be painstakingly slow: it’s probably shallow enough that scooping it up with a container is too difficult. The best method we found was to use towels to absorb as much water as we could, then wring it out into a bucket. Seemed quicker than a mop, anyway. Again, if you have a Stayfree pad at hand, use that instead to instantly clean up the water.

Step 8: Call a flood cleanup specialist. Don’t worry if these guys can’t make it out immediately – they still do a fine job of cleaning up the damage up to 24 hours later. You should DEFINITELY call these guys out even if you think you’ve cleaned up the damage, because your carpet underlay may develop rot and will smell worse than blackface “comedy” on a revived variety TV show. They’ll have special water vacuum machines which can clean up the rest of the flooding, and magical fans which blast the carpet underlay dry.

In my experience, the pricing quotes varied wildly for flood cleanup. I suspect a lot of these businesses are taking advantage of panicked people still in the shock of an immediate flood. Don’t commit to any one business until you’ve compared prices. You shouldn’t be paying any more than AU$300-400 for an average sized room of flood damage, and about AU$150-200 extra for each additional room. That does seem expensive, but some places were quoting upwards of AU$800!

If you’re in Melbourne, I recommend Budget Cleaning, who I ended up using. Very friendly guys, got everything fixed with minimal fuss and cost. I’m not making any money off that link, they were just really cost-effective and I recommend ‘em.

Step 9: Sleep at your mate’s house for the night. If possible, it’s worth getting out of the damn house so it doesn’t bring you down. Your buddy will cheer you up. Drink some gin. Gin was built for times like these.

Step 10: Contact a mate who explodes with excitement when he hears the word “Bunnings”. They’ll be able to help you sort out exactly what’s wrong with the washing machine. You probably just need a new pipe, or in my case, a way to stop the pipe from flying out of the bathtub. Don’t be afraid of drilling things into the wall if you’re renting, I say. What would you rather – lose your bond, or continually worry about further flooding every time you put a load of washing on?

The result is that you’ll have a washing machine that’s almost certain never to flood again. Every time you walk into that laundry and the floor remains bone-dry, I guarantee you’ll feel like you’ve won a little prize and will do a happy dance.

As I mentioned above, don’t use a heater during any stage of this process. If you’ve got wet wood parquetry, the floor boards will expand and pop out afterwards like mine have:

I’m more or less pretending those floorboards don’t exist and have just thrown a rug over them for now.

Everyone’s flooding situation will be different, and there’s probably some more advice people can add in comments here. Let rip with any extra suggestions you have, and may we all remain free of washing machine floods!