Dude, Dishwasher Duty

It was hard to take a weekend away from the house so soon after moving; the list of things that need to be done is really long, not to mention that we haven’t even finished moving out of the old house, even though our tenants have moved in. We left though,  came home to a disaster of our own mess, and will probably continue to live in this squalor for months. Why am I not more optimistic? Renegade was great though, as I get a chance to weed through my purchases I’ll show you some of them.

In the midst of everything else, I set a small goal yesterday to clear enough space off the dining room table so that I could work at it, rather than on the fabric couch in the humid hello-it’s-summertime heat. I succeeded, and I rewarded myself with a root beer. Take that, excess decor.

We’re trying hard to prioritize projects outdoors first to take advantage of this beautiful summer and have a plan to broach bigger interior projects with more intensity come wintertime, but sometimes other things inside need to come first. One of the things that needed our most immediate attention was the appliances in the house, namely the dishwasher, and the washer and dryer, all of which were much older than I am, probably installed in the late 60’s or early 70’s based on what the delivery guys said when they came to do our haul-away.

The laundry, we knew up front that we wanted to improve upon, and I had done plenty of research on brands and models prior to closing. The kitchen, on the other hand, is going to be bandaided for awhile. A big renovation will be in our future, but for the scale and quality that we have in mind, we’re going to have to stow away our nickels, which is OK, because we also want to live with the house in its current state for a long while to make sure we know in what ways we can improve upon it. All of that background is well and good, but our goal had been to live with the kitchen appliances that came with the house until the renovation, or until they pooped out on us… we’ve even decided to go without a microwave for as long as we can.

And then we moved in and began to organize our cabinets and noticed that the sellers had been living with a dishwasher that obstructed use of a drawer. And for the love of god, that’s inexcusable.

It didn’t take more than 3 days of living with having to open the dishwasher in order to slide open the drawer, and as much as we didn’t want to invest in a new dishwasher for a few reasons–cost, and knowing that it may not match the rest of the appliances we eventually choose for the kitchen when we remodel–we sucked it up and found ourselves pricing out a few models at a local big box that would be flush enough to accomodate the current drawer design.

The store had a buy-more-save-more sale going on at the time, the type of incentive that knocked our pre-selected washer and dryer down in price by a lot (more to come on what we bought another day), and made adding on a $600 dishwasher to our order even more productive (bought more, saved more). The dishwasher selection, in general I should say, seems a little underwhelming, and we knew this from some perusal of appliances in stores in the months and weeks before we closed (window shopping, you might say). Many of the products we looked at seemed cheaply made, with very wobbly drawers and hard-to-open and hard-to-close doors, but we settled on a stainless LG product for this upgrade, still not knowing if we would go with LG throughout the rest of the kitchen and then, without knowing if the stainless we were buying now would match the stainless that was sold a few years from now. There are lots of different shades and finishes of stainless appliances, so maybe we’ll end up reselling this product when we buy a future suite of appliances. So far it has a bit fingerprinty.

To help keep costs low, we decided to do our own install, by which I mean that Pete knew how to do the install and I supported him in his goal to save us an extra $129. To prepare the kitchen for the appliance delivery (they would carry the new dishwasher right into our new kitchen and leave it for us to figure out) we had to first remove the old dishwasher (for the f-r-e-e haul away) which meant turning off the power and disconnecting the product from the electrical and water supplies.

Sliding it out from under the countertop was said than done, because the sellers had at some point laid a new flooring in the kitchen and created a 3/4″ lip of new floor that we had to lift the dishwasher over to slide it free.

And also, we had to use some prybars to wedge and lift the countertop itself for a little extra clearance. Welcome to our then-messy kitchen. I’m slightly relieved in saying that it doesn’t look quite as bad at the moment.

The install of the new dishwasher wasn’t smooth either, let’s just say that we’re going to have a few plumbing updates in our future to modernize shut-off valves and corroded connections, but it’s worth having the new model in place. It’s the quietest dishwasher we’ve ever had, and does a nice song and dance when it finishes it’s cycle (enough to make the dog stop in his tracks and watch it with his head tilted). In the realm of immediate home updates, it’s one that we’re happy to have taken care of early; we never had to run the old dishwasher to learn how inefficient it was or how clean it did or didn’t get our glasses, but our new one is great.