Hot Stuff

We suffer from the 4th of July curse.  Our house punishes us for leaving it and rebels against us.  Not sure why, because it's not like we treat the house like a temple or talk in quiet, reverent tones when we're here.  At any rate, rather than enjoying the quiet, the appliances get together to plot their revenge.  Over the course of the last five years we have returned home to discover that the water heater, dishwasher, a/c unit and siding decided to draw straws and take turns dying off to give us a warm "welcome home"--particularly warm when the a/c died.  This year we thought that the curse was merely going to effect the Expedition, which died on the road to the beach.  Nope.  Apparently the appliances weren't going to be upstaged by a vehicle and they were determined to keep on dying off at their yearly rate.  This time the stove drew the short straw and went belly up.

Personally, I wasn't too broken up.  After working at the chocolate shop for four years and spending the majority of my time in front of a stove, I now hate to cook.  As far as I was concerned, the stove was giving me a free pass to avoid cooking.  Granted, I did miss the occasional frozen pizza, but I quickly learned how to cut it up & cook it in the toaster oven.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, or in this case desperately measuring half of a pizza to lop off to cook.

My mom and grandmother will be coming up to stay with the Gruesome Twosome while I venture out with J to Denver.  My grandmother is a cooking fiend and we knew that she is way too classy to cook anything with a mere microwave and a toaster oven.  J was far more excited about the prospect of a new stove than I was, so he put himself to the task of researching and reading reviews.  Unless the stove came with a personal cook, my only request was that it be white to match the new kitchen.  I can get excited about lipstick and read reviews until the cows come home, but I just can't muster up that level of enthusiasm for an appliance (unless we're talking about a coffee maker and in that case, there isn't enough bandwidth for me to read all the reviews).

Like everything else we encounter, the new stove gave us a hard time.  Our previous stove was a built in cabinet model, in wonderful 1985 almond tones (note the sarcasm on the "wonderful" part).  I didn't get a true "before" pic of the old stove, but here is one that appeared in an AOL pictoral a few years back about regular folks & their kitchens.

Looking stupid forever in the annals of AOL.

For starters, the plug box-y thing didn't have a plug.  We had to get an electrician out to fix the box-y thing.

Yeah, that box thing.

Not only was the box-y thing not compatible, neither was our counter.  The opening was 29" and the stove was 30".  I guess even stoves have put on a little weight over the past few years.  We called my father in law out and for the next hour or so, J & he measured & cut.

It didn't go smoothly.  The counter was so hard that one of the blades created so much friction that it scorched the wood.  The whole house smelled like s'mores, so that was a bonus. I may or may not have heard an invective or two tossed around in there, but I was goofing off on the internet, so I wasn't paying too close of attention.   Even after all their hard work, the stove still wouldn't fit all the way back into the opening--so much for our cabinets being square.  We have a carpenter coming out after the flooring is laid to do new counter tops and backsplash, so he'll get it flush with the wall.  Until then, there is a 4" gap between the wall and the stove.  Which totally agrees with me--it gives me a good excuse to not cook!  Can't run the risk of having stuff fall back there--right? Right??

Somebody needs to tell J my theory.  He is actually excited about the new stove & broke it in by cooking scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Showoff.

I'll be more excited when this project is done:

41 boxes of flooring