Kitchen Chores

When we bought the house in 1989 we installed a new Maytag dishwasher. It has served us well for twenty years and was still working but obviously reaching the end of it's dishwasher life span. The wall oven that sits directly above it was in the house when we bought it and is of unknown vintage. Norma was complaining that it had "cold spots" inside and did not bake properly. She may have been using some creativity in her description because she has been hinting for a modern stainless steel oven for some years now. We are also thinking of replacing the linoleum kitchen floor with tiles and that would raise the floor level so much that it would make it difficult to remove the dishwasher. Now was the time!

A week or so ago we went out and invested some of the family fortune on brand new stainless steel replacements, Maytag for the dishwasher and GE for the oven. We worked all day Wednesday on getting the old appliances out of their tight little cubbyhole. It was quite a struggle with a little cursing and a few cuts on the hands but they finally ended up on the driveway and Norma found a job of cleaning the old space of 25 or 30 years of dust, crumbs, cobwebs, various droppings and even one warfarin impregnated little four legged corpse(!) These little critters are not rare if you live near the sea and every once in a while we find traces of them in the crawl space. We set out bait and that is the end of them. This guy was searching for a quiet place to croak and managed to get up through the hole cut in the floor for the plumbing of the dishwasher. I did not need Las Vegas CSI to tell me he had been there for a very long time. Yuk!

Yesterday we started installing the new units. It was a tight squeeze but they went in. The dishwasher, although having a larger interior capacity than the old one was actually a bit smaller outside than it's predecessor. This is in thanks to most part to more efficient insulation and the fact that the motor compartment is much smaller. The cutout in the cabinets was not quite deep enough so I cut out the drywall behind it and shaved an inch off the studs in the now exposed wall. This gave me what I needed and allowed for better air circulation behind the units. I then built a 2 X 4 frame around the dishwasher to support the wall oven that went in next. It was a much tighter squeeze but it finally went in as well.

The dishwasher is done except for a few screws that go in around the open door frame to hold it in place and then the oven has to be wired. The cable that came attached to the new oven does not quite reach the electrical box so I will have to do some inventive wiring. That, along with testing everything, is today's project. The final oak trim will wait a few days as we have a wedding to go to on the weekend. I need a vacation!