**Last night seemed like a good time to disassemble the dryer**

At about 12:00am, no less.

When I was at work yesterday, Jon was doing a load of clothes, and he went to pull out and empty the lint trap. Next to the lint trap, I keep a little green trash can for lint and dryer sheets. As he was pulling out the trap, he whacked the lid to the trash can, and down the lint trap hole it went.

Oops.

We tried unbending a wire coat hanger to see if we could snag it, but that didn't work.

We tried wrapping the end of the unbent wire coat hanger with sticky tape to see if we could pull it up that way, but that didn't work either.

Jon then thought about the vent in the back, and thought if we pulled the dryer out from the wall, that maybe we could grab it through there.

The problem there was that the lint trap and the vent outlet didn't line up. Plus, the vent was too small for the lid to have passed through, even if we could have grabbed it.

So we were at an impasse. At this point, I was resigned to calling a repairman and paying an inordinate amount of money for him to get that stupid lid out.

Jon had other ideas, however. He went a got a wrench and start undoing the bolts on the back of the dryer.

"This seems like a bad idea," I said.

"This seems like a REALLY bad idea," he said.

(I should mention here that we HAD thought to unplug the thing, so we at least weren't risking an untimely death by electrocution.)

The wrench he was using wasn't really proper for the job, and it was not easy to get all the little bolts out. He finally did, and we pulled the back off...only to find that the dryer vent area was completely bolted in as well. (I'm not sure why we expected otherwise.)

So he starts in on those bolts as well...all the time sitting on the floor in a cramped space behind the dryer.

It didn't look to me like we'd be able to get the lint trap area actually removed from the dryer, even after the thing was unbolted. It was sort of wedged in at the top and the bottom, and I really didn't want to get into a full-fledged removal. I mentioned this to Jon. He kept working.

All the bolts were removed from the lint trap, and he pulled it out from the dryer at the bottom and wedged his hand in from the side to see if he could grab the lid. Much cursing insued, as he could feel it right at his fingertips, but couldn't quite grab it.

I tossed him the wire hanger that we were trying to use earlier, thinking he might could snag it with that. But that didn't work.

He kept finagling, and finally was able to wiggle his hand up into the trap enough to pull the lid out. Woohoo!

We reassembled and rebolted everything, and when we plugged it back it, it was even operational. What a victory...and there's no telling how much money we saved by not called a repair guy.