Thursday, June 21, 2012

i love the smell of new appliances in the morning

There is clearly still a lot of work to do, so the appliances are not the crowning jewel I had hoped they would be, but hey....look!
 


A fridge!  A Stove! 
And wait!  What's that?!


Another stove! (that's my fancy steam/convection oven)  And a dishwasher!
And a broom! (hahaha)

The rest of this post is just me babbling away so I have something to come back and read in my old age so I can laugh at it all, because I swear, I will never remodel another kitchen in this lifetime.

Read it if you want, but if you do, grab a cup o' something, because it's looong and rambling...and potentially full of typos, as I'm too tired to do much checkin'.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Getting the appliances in today was not a smooth event.  For starters, even though we bought all of the appliances from one place, they were coming in two deliveries.  The fridge and range were to arrive between 7:30am and 11:30am, and the steam oven and dishwasher from Noon until 4pm.  Go team.  The two delivery times requiring me to sit and wait the whole day was really just a time suck, not a real problem, though. Here were problems.

Remember the contractor who walked out on our kitchen job? The Turkey? Well, when the big stove came in, the delivery guys saw that the guys line TheTurkey had put in was larger than typical, and they did not have a connector piece that would go from his pipe to their gas line for the stove. 

TheMostImportantGuy had just left me there for the day and had headed off to work, but I called him and he came back so that one of us could watch the house (and the guys) while one would go get the part.  We decide that TheMIG will go get the part, but the installation guys are having a real difficult time being specific about what part needs to be picked up (as in, "...well just go get something sort of about this size.")  While they are all outside at the truck talking specifics, my phone rings and it's the delivery dispatcher who has already heard that we are holding up their drivers.  I hand TheMIG the phone (as I am about to flip....well, maybe I did flip), and he tells the dispatcher to chill out because he can go to the hardware store and back while they are installing the refrigerator.  And then he goes.  And I hear the fridge starting to make its way through the front door.

And then my phone rings again. It's the dispatcher again, and I tell him that TheMIG has left for the part and will be right back, and the dispatcher says that is not why he is calling. He is calling about the scratch on the fridge.   (?!!!)  He says that as "my husband" (teehee) was leaving he was shown the scratch but didn't agree to installation until he talked to customer service....but they're not calling him, they are calling me of course, and this is now my first news of it....but the installers are now marching my scratched fridge across the room.  This time I for sure flip, as it's starting to look a lot like the Who's On First routine with all the phone calls because now the dispatcher doesn't want to talk to UnreasonableMe, he wants to talk to TheReasonableMIG, so we get off the phone and are probably both trying to call the poor MIG who is quite busy at the hardware store trying to by "something sort of about this size."  Meanwhile, I tell the delivery guys to put the fridge down and go take a smoke break, oh-an-here's-some-bottled-water.  I look at the scratch while they do that.  It's very minor, and it's on the left side of the door and will probably be not noticeable at all because the bar is on the side.  But still.

TheMIG arrives back with the part, the installers call their dispatcher, who then calls me, and then I hand the phone back to TheMIG...and I only tell you all that to just illustrate what a circus this was becoming.  Anyhow, the dispatcher and TheMIG agree the fridge stays, and we get a $350 credit (so that's impressive, because now that it's in, I don't even see it).  But while TheMIG is on the phone hashing that all out,  I hear, "Uhhh...we have a problem..." coming from back behind the stove where there are working on hooking up the "something sort of about this size."  

It turns out that the new fitting is fine, but I have a duel fuel stove, so there are both gas and electric hook ups, and TheTurkey...?  He put in an electrical hook up for a clothes dryer, not for a stove.  So they can't plug it in, or push it in place (and it's a tank), or level it, or test the connections. 

The turn to the scratched fridge, and install that, but only with some difficulty as we can't figure out why there is no power (the switch was flipped at the box), and we can't find the water shut off for the ice maker because TheTurkey didn't put it near the fridge, he put it underneath the floor of the fridge, in the basement (weird).

So they leave.  The fridge is connected, but the stove is in the middle of the room, and at 12:30 the second crew shows up with the steam oven and dishwasher. 

Oh, I wish I had a picture of these guys.  They were maybe in their mid-twenties and they were identical twins.  I really couldn't get over the fact that they liked each other enough to work together, and you really could see the "twin-ness" in them as they talked to each other and worked together.  Anyhow.  The dishwasher went in without a hitch.  But the steam oven.  *sigh*  The couldn't get the power to come on with the steam oven, which we were told just took a standard outlet.  One of the twins goes down to check to see if the switch was off at the box, like it was with the other outlets, and as he is flipping stuff, I see sparks fly behind TheTankOfAStove that is in the middle of the room like the pink elephant no one will talk about.

It is at this exact moment that the plumber (who was there the day before fixing the bathroom leak that caused the ceiling to come down) stomps in and loudly announces, "I'm turnin' off the water!!!" because now that his seals are dry from yesterday he wants to check for leaks and change some other hardware thingy.... but the twins have the dishwasher going through a fill and drain cycle checking for their own leaks, and so now I am negotiating that while still trying to figure out why it looks there are fireworks happening behind the stove.

It as it his point that our HandyMan arrives (because I had called him and begged). I swear, there was white light around him.  A real angel on the scene.  In my mind at least. hahaha 

He and the twins figure out that the steam oven really doesn't take a standard outlet after all, it needs more juice.  He can fix it, but the twins have to leave without testing it.  As the HandyManOfWhiteLight takes out the clothes dryer outlet behind the stove, he sees that when TheTurkey installed it, he had pinched a wire in with the screws and that's why it sparked.  Handyman fixed that, and he somehow managed to get the stove in place all by himself, which is surprising, because it is HUGE.   We spent quite some time leveling it together, but I think we might need to tweak that some more.  It's really hard to get things level in a house that is 80+ years old, because nothing is square!   Handyman also fixed the outlet for the steam oven, so that is now working (although untested), but were were indeed there until at least 4pm fiddling, so it really did take the whole day!

End result?  Everything is fine. And shiny. And new.  And I am excited enough that I found myself even giggling a few times.  But there is one other surprising feeling I felt...but I will save that for tomorrow ;-)


 





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