One of the things my mother asked us to do when we were back at home for the holidays was to go and pickup a new dryer from costco. I figured this should be easy enough as all my mother needed was for us to physically load the thing into the van and bring it home.
We did that on Christmas eve thinking it would be a fast task. However when we got home and opened the thing up we realized that the dryer didn’t come with a power cable and that we were expected to buy our own and wire it into the machine. On top of that the dryer required a vent which wasn’t included. This required a quick trip out to home depot where we wandered around for a while looking for the vent until a nice lady there helped us out. More importantly while we were buying the vent she told us that although instructions call for a metal based vent we could get away with a plastic one.
Once we got our missing parts home we spent awhile trying to wire the new electrical cord to the dryer since the one we had didn’t quite match the pictures in the instruction manual. After a bit of guess work we think we got it setup right. The next step was to get the vent the installed and connected to the wall. Initially we started with the metal vent that the instructions suggested. Unfortunately due to the location of the existing exhaust pipe this didn’t work so we ended up having to swap to the plastic version.
Once we finally had it installed we checked with mom that she had paid up her home owners insurance since we weren’t ‘certified’ electricians and when we turned it on it could very well catch fire 
. Thankfully it seemed to turn on correctly and not start a fire.
Throughout this whole process nicole was laughing at the two of us and our amateur hour of home improvement. It was an interesting experience and thankfully we got the job done but at many points that $100 install fee was looking mighty good.
