Swimming in my Clothes

December 22nd, Emily and I were enjoying lunch in the main living area, when during it, I notice a beeping noise. I ask Emily if the washer is yelling at us, she decides to check, and calls out "oh yes it was!!"

The Washer/Dryer combination machine decided it liked the water better on the outside and was flooding our entryway, hallway, and bedroom. We are still waiting for our belongings to ship over, so we're rather lacking for towels at the moment. Thankfully we caught this fairly early and we had cleaned the filter on the front the week prior, so we were familiar with how to drain from the emergency water drain on the front. Filling 3 liters of empty bottles, it was finally drained, we soaked up the water with the 2 towels that we had, and checked inside the filter to discover that a coin had lodged itself in front of the filter.

That had to be the culprit, the error code had to do with water not being able to go out the drain, so it only makes sense. We removed the quarter, re-cleaned the filter to be sure, started a load, and left to do some errands.

After errands, Emily was stopping by to take care of our neighbor's cat, and I'd get the groceries home. On return, I can see a small trickle of water leaking out of our front door.
I open the door to find the entire hallway, entryway, and bedroom area pooled with water and starting to eek its way both into the bathroom and living room.

Someone with more social media experience than me would've taken the opportunity to take pictures for a certain blog, but I am not that person - and panic hit first.
How do you dry your floor when your towels are already soaked?
We had a bath towel and a hand towel for this occasion, hanging up on the shower to try out, so I decided the best solution was to leave the bath towel to dry as much as possible, and to use the hand towel to soak up as much as possible, and ring out in the shower.
Rinse and repeat.

It took several hours of doing this before it was little-enough water to be able to consider drying, not just soaking and ringing, and that's where the not-quite-dry bath towel came into play. Thankfully around this time, Emily got home, and I was able to lift up the bed so that she could get water out from under it.

Rentals in the Netherlands still want you to give a best effort to fix appliances before calling for help, so the next two days were spent researching this washer/dryer, researching the error code, then unhooking and cleaning filters, nozzles, and pipes, but nothing seemed bad enough to incur this sort of failure, so on the 24th, I reach out to the property manager, who says that due to holidays, we're unlikely to get anyone until after the new year.

The good news is that because we're watching over the neighbor's cat, we can borrow their washer and dryer in the meantime, but now with the New Year, they're back, and we only have the handful of clothes that we'd packed in luggage with the expectation that the rest of our clothes would come in the shipment of our belongings, which has yet to even leave the US.

Silver linings, we live near what we assume are laundromats, we're to the New Year, so we can start scheduling a repair, and the shipment company got back to us with the final form necessary to ship our belongings out. Many things will be able to move forward with the New Year, and I'm sure we'll have a post on that, it's about to get hectic with paperwork, schedulings, and seeking employment, but we are getting closer to getting back to life as normal.