Move Your Laundry Room, Dummies

Laundry Room in Basement

Our researchers aren't fools (unlike so many of the freelancers they expose as... well, fools): they keep a file of potential candidates so they can loaf through the day every once in a while instead of googling the heck out of the internet. After all, they want to get in some seat time or an hour or two at the gym, too. For today, we're featuring a house favorite off that list, the one and only Naima Manal (before this entry, already a 14-time DotD). Naima's proven incompetent across a wide variety of fields, especially appliances. Today, Ms. Manal holds forth on remodeling, as she explains "How to Move Your Laundry Room to the Basement"¹... sort of.

When someone asks a question like this, we expect to get quality do-it-yourself advice. We don't expect to find boilerplate bull, such as this "advice" from Naima:

"Hire a plumber to install the water and drain lines for the laundry... Hire an electrician to install the electrical outlets for the washer and the dryer..."

Dammit, woman, if we wanted to hire electricians and plumbers, we wouldn't be looking for "how-to" advice, now would we"! Oh, and Naima? Have you ever heard of a gas dryer? Maybe you should have mentioned that hookup in your list of things for a plumber to do... And then there's this tasty little suggestion:

"Locate the main sewage line in the basement. If it has a standard access plug, a laundry drain line can be connected to it as an extension." For one thing, we doubt your local building code would allow you to install a discharge line in place of the access plug (which is often outside, anyway). More to the point, Naima, what if the main stack is above the level of your proposed laundry room? Do you install an ejector pump? what? Help us here, Naima! There is, of course, more: as usual, Manal displays ignorance of even the simplest DIY tasks. Take, for instance, this one:

"Fill in any holes made in the walls from the plumbing and electrical installations with joint compound. Once the compound is dry, paint the laundry area walls..."

Words cannot express just how useless this instruction is. But, then words can rarely express how useless Naima's instructions are. We did note with some glee that Manal adds an entire section on enclosing the new laundry room, complete with such bon mots as

"Insulate and cover the wall with drywall. The insulation will help regulate the heat from the laundry room and deafen [sic] the sound of the machines when they are on..."

No, dear homeschooling mom (your kids must score super on standardized tests!), that's just your usual bullshit advice. Not only that, but you already had us paint the walls: how we gonna do that if we haven't hung drywall yet? Sheesh: and now you know why this woman collects Dumbass of the Day awards like the Yankees used to collect American League pennants.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7269404_move-laundry-room-basement.html

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