December 15, 2014 – Dayspring Disciples

After the deck was finished this fall, I had no new projects up my sleeve. I figured that John had worked so hard on the deck that I would still my tongue and let the dude enjoy some much needed R-and-R. At most I hoped maybe he’d put a door on the laundry room sometime this year. The Next Project was actually going to be a Stacy-Project: painting the master bedroom and getting rid of the old carpet.

We’re keeping the carpet.

Oh – it started out SOOOOOOOO innocently, as John looked at our 31 year old stove one evening and asked, “Do you think we should tackle the stove now while it’s our idea, instead of waiting until it dies and being forced to do something about it?” I concurred that sounded perfectly logical.

Our faucet was also leaking abundantly. He couldn’t do a quick fix on that (he’d tried twice) and knew he’d have to rip out the whole faucet. And everyone gets a new countertop, sink, and stove when they get a new faucet, right?

Two months and a bunch-o-dollars later – we have a kitchen update.

Here is the BEFORE picture. Enjoy it. I rarely take BEFORE pictures.

What you can’t totally see is that the stove is built in. Now – why didn’t you just buy another built in stove? (Oh WHY WHY WHY not?)
They are really expensive. (She moans to herself.)

I ordered a new stove online. How did I know exactly what size to buy? Because I laid mirrors on the floor under the stove and measured with a measuring tape. Do you know the first stove we bought in 1997 was $300. They aren’t $300 anymore. Just sayin.’

See that extra almost-an-inch of empty space? See the DIRT? LOL.

Meanwhile, I also squeezed in a visit to Home Depot where I found out there are more options for kitchen counters than there ever needed to be. I had done all my measurements and used an online tool to estimate the cost of the counter. Except I was wrong with what we’d choose. I figured we would choose some lovely solid surface counter. But no. Not when the granite and quartz are On Sale. The granite choices were all rather dark, while quartz has lots of light colored options. I truly didn’t care. And oh – by the way – the sale ends tomorrow night at 8PM. Sigh. So my mom generously offered to come over Sunday after dinner allowing John and I to go down there to order a counter. I took him because I couldn’t pick. It was silly how many choices there were. Does there really need to be? So – this is what he chose. I liked it.
The man who wrote up our quote kept getting it wrong. I knew because I’d measured at home before. No matter – they’d figure out when the counter people came to measure that we would owe more.

So – we figured the first step was for John to pull out the old stove and cut away the counter in back and the trim wood up front.
This step went exceedingly well. We were joyous to find that the stove was NOT hard-wired in, but in fact a lovely outlet lay there just ready to accept a new stove. This was the first and last smooth piece of the project.

Because our God is SO good, we didn’t immediately take the stove to the curb. The Holy Spirit must have been leading John wonderfully that day, because John was prompted to just put the stove in the garage. Johanna and Tabitha enjoyed playing on it with sand toys.

Then – our new stove arrived. Ta da. Isn’t it pretty.

It seems perfectly normal to know that the first time I tried to cook a meal on it I was sobbing because I’d made such a big mistake. I could barely fit our big pots on it. I couldn’t use the back at all while I was cooking on the front. And – oh yeah – now our microwave wouldn’t work.

I couldn’t imagine cooking on it for years to come. We were stuck. Oh stupid me.
But wait – SEARS rocks. SEARS will not only let you return a Major Appliance. They will come and pick it up for free. No restock fee. No fine for wasting their time. Nothing. Yeah SEARS.

I wish we could have purchased the next stove from them, but alas. The one we now wanted was not available through SEARS until 12/26. We had to order through Home Depot.

Someone from the countertop company (Home Depot contracts with) came out and measured and sure enough, we owed more.

So – I left for my cruise expecting my family to have the old stove removed and the new stove brought in.

Except Buffalo got All That Snow, and they couldn’t deliver the new stove. So John went out to the garage, vacuumed out the sand, and jerry-rigged the old stove in place so that they could eat.

Finally the new stove arrived. Have I yet mentioned that I don’t like stainless steel? No matter. It was on sale and I can handle that.
I’m a bit worried about all the techo-pieces of the control panel. I predict a blog entry about that. What you won’t find is a blog entry about how they delivered it with a dent just before Thanksgiving and when John called the following Monday Home Depot tried to get out of fixing it because we didn’t call within 48 hours. It was completely lost on them that if they don’t answer the phone it isn’t our fault. (Five weeks later it was finally taken care of.) Shall I mention now that stoves don’t cost $300 anymore? In fact, this one was more than $300 more than the white one. Ack.

Then – no sooner than we finished the Scrooge play it was TIME FOR THE COUNTER.
We moved our kitchen to the laundry room. OSHA wouldn’t love the bleach next to the crock-pot, I know. (Thanks, Tara.)

For the next 24 hours we sometimes had water and sometimes did not. Mostly did not.

I’ll spare you some miserable stories about dishwasher pipes cracking and water leaks.

Like our kitchen?

We had originally contemplated doing the work ourselves, but a few YouTube videos of counter installations showed us we’d quickly use up whatever money we saved in buying new tools. And that was when we were looking up solid surface counters. We never saw one of these things on YouTube. Some suction contraption.