When in Doubt, Call Dad

Happy 09/09/09! Not quite sure what the big deal about 9s is (unlike 06/06/06 for bad luck or 07/07/07 for good), except apparently in China and Japan. Either way, it's pretty fun. I wonder if people at the turn of the century did the same thing.
Anyway, 09/09/09 must be some form of luck because our builder made it out to the house to put a new dryer vent cover on...wait...new implies there was an OLD one. Our builder came out to put A dryer vent cover on as well as a "retaining wall" around the vent. "Huh?" you may be asking. Here's what happened. We did a few loads of laundry shortly after we moved. We noticed the dryer collected a lot of condensation around the knobs, but figured that was because we had to door to the utility room closed. I tried a few more loads a few weeks later and the dryer took FOR-EVER to dry. It heated up, but the water wouldn't go anywhere. That was weird. We begin researching potential problems and they all ended with "call a service tech." Since the dryer heated up, we really didn't think that was the problem. So we did what any responsible homeowner would do--we called Dad. Actually, my parents were planning to come up over Labor Day anyway, so Dad just said to hold off on more laundry (oh twist my arm!) and he'd check it out. We decided there was some kind of vent issue so Husband and I did a little more investigating. We never really decided where our dryer vent led. We had the pipe inside, but didn't see it on the outside. One night, Husband and his brother moved our dryer. They poured at least a coke bottle's worth of water out of the connecting tube. "Hmmm," we said. On Saturday, our curiosity got the better of us, so we took our coffee across the street to a model we had looked at that is still unoccupied. We walked around that house searching high and low for what was different about our house. Finally we found it on the last wall. Between the breakfast nook windows and the electric meter was a hole dug out, with a little retaining wall keeping the area around a dryer vent cover open. "We don't have that!" we said. We then crossed the street where they just laid the slab for our floor plan as well. Sure enough, there was a pipe that went from the utility room, under the slab, and ended right outside. They covered our vent over with dirt! Duh that our dryer became a steam washer; the water had nowhere to go! My dad and Husband dug out around the pipe so that I could do the desperately needing done laundry and our builder received a very calm, but very pointed phone call Tuesday to come fix it. It has been done so I don't need to pull a Dooce (which is good. I'd hate to lose all 3 of my readers! I love y'all). We are still very excited about our house; we just hate that through all of our walk-throughs and inspections, no one caught this. Hopefully that's all though!