We have some recent additions to our kitchen that have increased our collection of countertop appliances that I want to share with you!  I’d say we have an average to small-sized kitchen – it’s probably 120 square feet if I had to guess, so counter space is a bit limited.  When my husband begged for months to get an espresso machine, I cringed at the thought of adding yet another “permanent” thing to our countertops.  I already felt like I was fighting for enough space to cut vegetables!

In the end though, I lost the battle.  And now, we welcome “Silvia” into our home.

That’s her on the left, next to the coffee grinder named “Rocky”.  And to complete our own in-home coffee shop experience, you can see our tea kettle and the french press as well.

I have to say, they all look sleek and stylish hanging out together, don’t they?  Like they could be best buds.

I’m pretty sure with the addition of the espresso machine, my husband has an internal debate each morning – “coffee? or cappuccino?  or maybe latte?”  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately, I get next to nothing out of the whole deal.  I’ve never liked coffee.  I tried really hard when the TV show Friends was popular and coffee shops suddenly became THE place to be in 1998 when I was in high school – but I remember gagging on my first latte and swearing I’d just swallowed arsenic-laced mud.  Coffee and me just weren’t meant to be.  Luckily I can handle the smell, but I doubt I’ll ever become a coffee drinker, much to the amazement of every overnight host whose jaw drops when they ask if I want my morning coffee and I politely explain my lack of interest.

In college, I discovered tea and chai, so at the very least I can now have a lovely homemade vanilla chai latte  But first, I have to learn how to USE the thing!

How about you?  Are you a coffee drinker?  Or maybe married to one like me and don’t quite understand the morning ritual?

And what is on your countertop?  Do you have any prized appliances that have a permanent home there? (I’m thinking a countertop tour is in order!)

I’m back for part 2 of our exciting edge-of-your-seats installation of our dishwasher.  Let’s get to it!

Yesterday, I told you how we solved our little plumbing and electrical problem by cutting a few extra holes in our cabinet and rerouting the electrical hook-up and cutting the copper pipe so we could thread the hose connection into the sink cabinet base.  Here’s a picture of what the final configuration under our sink looks like:

That’s a lot of stuff going on, so as said in the Princess Bride, lemme ‘esplain.  No, that is too much.  Lemme ‘sum up.

It’s a crazy mess of hoses and wires under there now, but it works!  The Inlet hose attachment comes up through the cabinet floor and then has a loop that sticks into the side of the cabinet before it attaches to the shortened copper pipe.  That large weird looking attachment at the end of the hose is a “leak detector”…or something fancy-schmancy like that.

The drain hose also comes in through the cabinet floor and then loops up high in our cabinet so there is an air pocket before it attaches to the garbage disposal.

The air gap is necessary so that you don’t have back flow into the dishwasher or nasty sewer or disposal smells, which was a major problem with our previous dishwasher.  You can see that for now, we just used a bit of electrical tape to hold the hose up.  Fear not, eventually there will be a more permanent solution.

Last, there’s the junction box, which connects the electrical line that DH changed in the basement to the electrical to power the dishwasher.  Again, eventually we’re going to try to nestle the junction box towards the back of the cabinet so that it’s out of the way.

Once we had all of the hoses and electrical in place, and had leveled the dishwasher, we did a test run to make sure everything worked okay.  We were a bit concerned that all the kinks and bends in the pipes would cause problems, but not so!  Everything worked perfectly!

We finished installing our new dishwasher by putting in a few screws under the countertop and putting on the kick plate, and then she was done!

All bright, shiny, and new!  Looks great, right?

I was a little concerned about how stainless steal would look in our kitchen with our other white appliances, and with our dark cabinets, but I think it’s a HUGE improvement over our old dishwasher.

Here’s a before and after so you can see the difference

Love it!  We’ve started filling it up for our first load, but we already know from our test run that it is SUPER quiet.  This makes me giddy with excitement.

Of course now I must venture into the world of cleaning stainless steal appliances.  I’ve heard of the never ending fingerprints and smudges.  I’m actually more concerned about water.  As you can see, right above our dishwasher is all of DH’s coffee-making stuff (I’m really resisting using a more negative adjective…) and there are often drips and pools of water after he’s finished in the morning, many which will end up on the dishwasher.

Does anyone have any stainless steal cleaning tips?  I’d love to hear ‘em.

Hope you enjoyed our dishwasher installation play-by-play.  I realize a lot of our “problems” are fairly unique to our house, but hopefully it will prove helpful for anyone else who chooses to go the DIY installation route.  We figure we saved about $100 by doing a self-installation.  And since we’re still DIY newbies, we’re giving ourselves a big pat on the back for this one

September was a crazy busy month here on the Prairie.  We started another semester with DH teaching and me working on campus; and the adjustment back to “regular” after a wonderful summer took a little getting used to.  But we made it through!

Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for our house.

Don’t freak out, our house is still standing – praise the Lord!  ’Cuz it was close there, for a moment  - but it definitely took a bit of a beating.  Not intentional, of course.

Our house is over 100 years old, so you’d kind of expect it to be full of issues and ready to fall apart.  But sadly, most of the, shall we say, “issues” had to do with more modern conveniences.

I think it all originally started with the dishwasher, or so we thought.

As you can see from this picture, it’s not exactly hip and modern.  The thing is probably a good 15 years old, at least.  In dishwasher years, I’m pretty sure that’s close to death.  Because this thing is loud and clunky and smelly.

One happy day, we noticed a nice puddle of water around the base of our beloved elderly DW.  It seeped a bit into our basement and it was wet for a little while.  Deep down inside, I cheered a bit.  I would love to get a new one, and this was just the thing that needed to happen so that we could kick this old fogey to the curb.

But it didn’t happen again.  Bummer.

However, the DW did, for some reason that we still can’t figure out, retain water at the end of the cycle.  There would be about an inch of standing water in the bottom of the basin at the end of each completed cycle, and it would just sit there. And eventually, it was rank. Super duper gross.  The only way to get rid of it, was to find some random teeny tiny part of the cycle on the dial that drained the water (somewhere in the middle of the cycle) and have the DW do it again.  Very high-tech.

So I’m not sure if you would say that our DW is completely kaput, but it’s definitely on it’s last legs.  After the 83rd time messing with the draining water issue, I finally told DH that the DW is the first appliance we’re replacing.

And then we both agreed that we’d wait until our home warranty is up before we buy any appliances

Because the HW is how we got the new garbage disposal that also broke this month.  More on that in part 2.  (There’s going to be 4 parts, because yes, we did have THAT much go wrong…just you wait!)