** I’m retyping this because WordPress somehow ATE my original POST AARGH! **

There are few things that give me more pleasure than fixing something myself when it would have probably cost big $$’s to fix professionally.

Case in point: this morning, my mini van’s automatic sliding doors decided to stop working on the passenger side.

I might not have even noticed it, but the van has a special feature in that when the door is open or ajar, it BEEEEEPS wildly until you close the door. Since the door wouldn’t open OR close, this was a problem. I even tried to manually open and close the door to see if it would work… no dice.

Since I was in a rush to get Eileen to the clinic for her shoulder I decided to forget fixing the problem for now and drive.. but there was this BEEEEPING noise because of the door being ajar! Aargh!

Good news, though! If you turn the sliding doors “off”, the beep goes away too! I was slightly psyched at this point.

We finally get to the clinic and I just couldn’t let it go – it was bugging me that I had to go up to Chicopee to get this problem resolved and I just couldn’t let it rest. I decided to do a quick search on Google and came up with this:
2001 Honda Odyssey Power sliding door trouble

Who would have thunk that if you unplug the #13 fuse and wait 30 seconds that the door would magically start working again!?!? Needless to say I was pretty satisfied with myself that I managed to fix the problem and save a few bucks in the process!

Another recent problem was fixed by yours truly as well: the pump in my front loading washer started making horrible noises and stopped working.

This was another one of those galling problems. I knew it was a simple fix, but Sears wanted some outrageous amount to walk in the door OR pay an upfront fee (something like $279) to fix the issue and warranty the problem for a year.

Since I went down this road once before, I KNEW that something was just lodged in the pump and all I needed to do was open it up, clean it out and I’d be all set. BUT (and there’s always a BUT), the washer was FULL of water! Good news: you can get the water out of a front loading washer pretty easily. There’s something called GRAVITY that works WONDERS when trying to get water out of a washer!

The washer is on the first floor, so all I needed was a stretch of hose to run to the basement sink and tip the drain hose down to it and VIOLA! all the water came out and I was in business.

I opened up the the pump and what did I find?? $2.25 in quarters, an old swipe card from a hotel we stayed in three years ago (yes THREE years ago) and three paper clips – the culprits!

There you go TWO fixes and I saved myself hundreds… ain’t life grand?