Our washing machine has made quite a lot of trips to the repair shop over the last couple of years, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to find out this week that it wasn’t worth repairing after a recent breakdown.

In Honiara there are not a lot of options for buying appliances. There are some smaller stores that sell imported goods of questionable quality from Asian countries, but there is really only one store where you can buy imported Australian appliances of reputable quality.

This afternoon we went to that store to see what our choices were. There was only one brand available and 2 different models to choose from. We decided on the larger copacity one because we can wash our curtains and larger items and it wasn’t a lot more expensive than the slightly smaller one. The store did agree to give us a small discount and deduct what we had paid for the last repair on the old machine because it still didn’t work. $821.00 US dollars later we had a new washer. It’s not fun spending that much money when you weren’t counting on it, but not being able to shop around for a better price or a different choice makes the shopping experience harder!

Yesterday we took our TV into a repair shope to have the wobbly RCA jack resoldered. The TV still worked, but we had to find ways to hold plugs into the jack so they would make a good contact. The repairman said it would probably be ready in the afternoon. When the Tim went to pick it up, the repairman said that now it wasn’t working at all and it might not be repairable. Today the news is that it needs a new part and may be repairable. The part will have to be ordered from Australia before we know if the TV can indeed be repaired. In the meantime it’s one less distraction. I guess we can go watch the washer spin…