I’ve lived in my house for 13 years now and have spent a silly amount of time unwinding the damage inflicted by Harry the Homeowner. Harry was the original owner of the house, a somewhat handy person with an unfortunate desire to reach beyond his grasp. He also didn’t let little things like fire and construction codes get in his way, and every couple of years or so, I have to get a contractor to fix some of Harry’s handiwork or just take care of it myself.

Thus recently, when the washing machine bit it after 15 years of faithful service — after the dryer had been repaired three times since we moved in — I immediately got worried. The washer and dryer were tucked into an alcove in an extra room that Harry built himself (the room is beautiful, cold and drafty, for the record). Harry could have made the alcove of any depth, but he chose to make it so shallow that most modern house-size washers and dryers won’t fit in there. This vastly limited my choices for washers and dryers, although I found an energy efficient GE set I was happy with.

He then placed the dryer vent in an odd location on the floor in the corner (and did such a poor job of connecting the vent that it regularly became disconnected and blew lint all over the alcove). Harry made this location work by finding a dryer that vented out the right side — so a replacement, ideally, would do the same thing. There are only a few brands today that have this option, but I couldn’t find one that was small enough to fit into the alcove.

After a lot of searching, I decided to take a chance and go with the GE set that would fit into the space. The dryer vented out the back, but I had about six inches to spare back there, and the Home Depot salesman thought a typical vent hose would fit. I was skeptical.

But today, the delivery crew showed up and installed the washer and dryer. The crew was amazingly efficient — the whole operation took less than half an hour — and they squeezed a standard vent hose into place without crimping it. The space still might have been better served by a periscope vent, but the installation looks fine and the appliances work well. And another one of Harry’s patch jobs has been taken care of.