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

After much discussion (and begging) I convinced my husband to install our new dishwasher in our kitchen.  It’s been sitting in the middle of our kitchen for a week and a half, proving to us both that there’s no room for an island in our tiny kitchen.

Proof is in the pudding, folks – here’s our makeshift dishwasher island:

Glamourous, isn’t it?  You can also see first hand evidence of the awful fluorescent lighting we have – lovely, yes?

On to the dishwasher…

First step was removing our old dishwasher.  We followed these directions here and here for uninstalling our old dishwasher.  The process was relatively straightforward – turn off the electrical for the DW, shut off the water right under the sink, and then remove all electrical and water connections and unscrew the dishwasher from the counter, then shorten the legs and wiggle the old guy out of the cabinet housing.  It took a little while to remove the old dishwasher – probably about 1 1/2 hours – but that’s because I have a very thorough, patient, and perfectionist husband   The only tools we used were a screw driver, pliers, and a small pan to catch the water coming out of the water inlet line.

Once we had the old guy removed, we realized we were going to have to do some creative problem solving in order to install our new dishwasher.  The electrical and plumbing for our old dishwasher were both in inconvenient places for our new one.

(Hello ugly pealing latex paint!)

The copper tubing came to the front of the cabinet for our old DW, whereas our new DW has an included hose at the back that needs to be threaded into the neighboring cabinet under the sink.  And the electrical needed to be moved as well.  I think at this point, we were oth convinced we’d have to call a plumber.

But we persisted.  We managed to cut a hole in the subfloor and the cabinet base with a reciprocating saw to reroute the electrical – thank God for the drop ceiling in the basement, or this would have been impossible.  You can see the new electrical line running in through the cabinet base.

Then we had to solve the water inlet problem, which was really stumping both of us.  We had to get this hose…

to go through this hole…

and attach that large plastic bit at the end of the hose to this copper tubing or pipe, which happened to also be the wrong size.

Fun times, right?

Basically, we had three options.

1.  Shorten the copper tubing and make the connection to the dishwasher hose BEHIND the dishwasher in the same cabinet.  We wanted to avoid this so we have access to the connection for the inlet in case of leeks.

2. Loop the copper tubing back around into the sink cabinet (basically doubling back due to space) and put the provided hose through a new hole in the cabinet and have the connection under or on the floor of the sink cabinet.  For this option, we were worried we’d kink the tubing if we weren’t super careful.

3. Run the provided hose into the sink cabinet, cut the copper tubing, and make for a very tight squeeze (if it’s even possible) in the sink cabinet.  For this one, we thought we’d need to call a plumber, which we were hoping to avoid.

After much discussion, and pleading for help on gardenweb.com in the plumbing section of their forums, we found a solution that would give us the best of all solutions: completely DIY, inexpensive, and would result in our preferred configuration of hoses, pipes, and tubes.  (Did you know there’s a difference?  Yeah, I didn’t…)

Here’s a little diagram to explain the plumbing below our sink:

On the left, you’ve got the 1/2″ copper tubing that goes into the cabinet housing the dishwasher, which is to the left of our sink.  Apparently most copper tubing is 3/8″ inch, but we discovered ours was conveniently an abnormal size.

Next, you have a 5/8″-3/8″ reducer.  The 5/8″ refers to the outside diameter (OD) of the 1/2″ copper pipe, which is to the right.  Furthest right is the ball valve, which is used to shut off the water supply to the dishwasher.

In order to fit the hose connection into this area, we decided to cut the copper pipe…

and use a union reducer to fit the 1″ hose to the 1/2″ copper pipe.  We cut the copper pipe using a $10 pipe cutter that we found at our local hardware store.  We also bought a new brass union reducer since the one included with the dishwasher would not fit our copper pipes.

Here’s a view of our new shortened copper pipe fitted with union reducer and the freshly cut hole in the cabinet base for the hose.

Now that we’ve got our plumbing set correctly, and our electrical rewired (we even installed a junction box!) I think we’re finally ready to install the dishwasher.  Seriously, the detour to fix all of this took about 2 1/2 hours!  It was exhausting.  Stay tuned for part two, in which we ACTUALLY install the dishwasher.  It’s edge-of-your-seat action here, folks!

Guess what finally was delivered today?

No, not a cute snuggly new puppy – though my heart would melt if we had one of these:

I love corgi’s – they’re so adorable!

But no, what was delivered was much more sleek and shiny.  It’s one of these:

At last, we have a new dishwasher!  It’s a Bosch 800 plus fully integrated dishwasher.  It’s full of crazy features like a delay start timer, built in water softener, and an option for half loads.  It’s also energy star certified, which means it’s super energy efficient and only uses about 2 gallons of water per load!  Factor that into our current water bill, and we could save around $100 a year with our new fancy-pants dishwasher.

I’m most excited about the fact that this lovely new appliance is SUPER quiet.  As in, barely heard when you walk by it.  How do I know?  My parents have an almost identical dishwasher in their recently remodeled kitchen, and the noise is almost undetectable.  It clocks in at 40 dBA, which technically makes it one of the quietest dishwashers you can buy. When I googled comparisons of 40 dBA, I come up with these descriptions: quiet residential area, quiet office, and library!  That will surely be a huge improvement over our current dishwasher, which sounds like a hurricane passing through our kitchen.

Speaking of our soon to be recycled dishwasher – it’s from 1992!

I had to do some searching online, but did you know that you can date almost any appliance if you have the model and serial number right here?  It’s pretty handy.  I found out that our dishwasher is a teenager, as well as our refrigerator.  No wonder they’re so noisy!

I’m super excited to replace our old worn out leaky and smelly dishwasher with our new upgraded one.  Sparkly clean dishes, here I come!

It’s time for another edition of Weekend Planning!  I neglected to share my plans last week, and frankly, I can’t remember if I actually got anything done.  Whoops.  Hopefully this time around, sharing it with you will help keep me accountable!
House:

- Put the hide-a-bed away in the basement (something that should have been done 2 weeks ago!)

- Find a selection of (cheap) hardware for our downstairs bathroom – we need knobs, toiled paper holder, and towel bar.

- Continue researching paint options for our dining room and living room

- Research how to make small repairs on plaster walls (anyone have experience?)

- Make hummus for lunches next week

- Sweep and mop the kitchen floor (it’s been neglected in my daily chores)

Personal:

- remove batteries and memory card from my camera and package it to send on Monday to Chicago for repair

- Give myself an at-home facial

- Relax with DH before a crazy week begins!

How about you? What are your weekend plans?

One of the first things I complained about in our new (old) house is the kitchen faucet.

See here?

(No, my kitchen isn’t this clean.  This is from when we were house hunting almost a year ago.)

Well, that there faucet BUGS THE CRAP OUT OF ME!  Seriously.  It’s a pull out spray faucet and is lovely and everything, but one VERY important feature is lacking.  Rotation.

I kid you not – our faucet does not swivel, twist, rotate, or whatever you want to call it.  It is permanently stuck in that one position.

Which means, our 2 basin sink is annoying to do dishes in, because water only fills one side, and to get in the other, you have to pull the sprayer out, turn the water on with the other hand, fill/wash item, put item down, turn sprayer off, and then put sprayer back. Way too many steps.  OR you can spray water EVERYWHERE while you attempt to use the sprayer once the water is already on.  I full admit to using both strategies and hating both!

So, I’m on a mission to find a new kitchen faucet.  Maybe someday we’ll gut the whole room and redo it (cracking linoleum floors is SO stylish right now), but for now, I just need a functional kitchen.  I’d be a happy woman if I had a better faucet.  *ahem*

But I can’t find one I like! I’m super picky and heavily research any purchases that I’m going to be stuck with on a day to day basis for more than a week, so I’ve been waffling about this for months.  So please help me!

Here’s my requirements:

- Needs to have a brushed or polished silver finish

- Needs to either have a three hole fixture or an included deck plate (or both)

- I’m liking the current goose-neck high-arch look, and since we have a big sink, I think this will work

- Needs to be a pull-out or pull-down sprayer since the other whole for this is currently occupied by our broken RO water dispenser.  The sprayer should have a pause button or some cool feature similar to that

- Needs to not cost an arm and a leg (less than $300 for sure, but preferably even less…)

There ya go, now hit me with some ideas!

Well, now that you’ve heard about our dishwasher’s woes (yes, it still doesn’t work perfectly and still smells bad) you can hear about the next thing that broke this month.

Our garbage disposal.

I know, glamorous, right?

But I never knew how much I relied upon this oft-taken-for-granted “appliance”.

(I wish our cabinet under our sink was this clean!)

One day, our disposal just started to loose steam.  It was aging in it’s own way.  A very hoarse motor-about-to-die kind of way.  Eventually, we flipped the switch, and nothing happened.  I got used to peeling carrots into a bowl and brushing onion skins and garlic skins into the bowl.  It actually almost inspired me to start composting!   Which is actually something I’d like to start doing but have been too busy to investigate further.

After scouting out prices for a new disposal, we realized that our home-warranty was the way to go with this one because we’d save some money in the end.  Huzzah!

So, several days later, and in the midst of Thing That Broke #3 (just you wait, this ones the best!), we got a brand new disposal!

However, unfortunately, while the service man was fixing it, he happened to cut a small plastic pipe that led to Thing That Broke #4.  Yup.  The saga continues…