Action packed weekend!
We had lots of things going on this past weekend, or at least lots of photo-friendly things, so I'm going to start with replacing our cooktop in the kitchen, which I tackled after work on Friday.
For about four years now we've had a glass/ceramic electric cooktop in our kitchen, which replaced the Eisenhower-era stove that was in the house when we bought it. That one had a faulty burner on it, and bought itself a one-way trip to the landfill when the faulty burner caught fire. The fancy glass one was on clearance at Sears. We liked the smooth top, but grew to dislike the arduous cleaning process that followed every use.
One morning last week I was making lunches for the kids and discovered that the glass surface had cracked. It was a long thermal crack across two of the burners - meaning the surface material had weakened from many cycles of heating and cooling over the years. Sears offers a limited warranty on the surface itself, but you have to pay for the labor to replace it, and before you even get that far you have to pay $75 to have a technician come out, look at the crack, and decide whether it qualifies for the warranty coverage at all. Sears could send someone out the following week to have a look.
We like cooking and eating food just about every day, so for less than what the Sears rigamarole was going to cost me, I was able to buy a new cooktop. I installed the glass one when we bought it back in 2005, and so I installed this one too.
What I've learned about appliances over the years is that for the most part they're not very complicated - you have to be comfortable working with electrical components, and you have to be able to get the right parts when you're doing a repair. The Internet has been indispensable for providing part diagrams and step-by-step repair guidance. I've repaired our washer, dryer, fridge, and stove in the past couple years, probably saving us a lot of money in service calls.
Anyway, the new stove. The first order of business is getting the old one out of there, which means shutting off the circuit, pulling everything out of the cabinets underneath, unwiring the old unit from the electrical connection, and pulling it out. Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to snap a picture of my starting point, but here's how it looked when I got the old stove out of there:
Next, installing the new unit. You can see we went back to electric coils - they're becoming harder to get as the manufacturers shift to the higher-priced smooth surface models, but I didn't want the eventual hassle of another thermal crack, and anyway we're hoping to renovate the kitchen in a couple years, at which point we're going to convert to gas:
Wiring in the new stove was a snap - probably took less than ten minutes. Next order of business was to put everything back in place. I discovered that the drawers directly underneath the stove no longer fit in place, because the dimensions of the basin underneat the new stove were different from the old one.
The first drawer I put in won't close:
And this picture is blurry, but you can see what the leading edge of the drawer is just about 1/4" (0.6cm) too tall:
So I was going to have to trim the drawers. At this point I was out of daylight, and I'm not really set up to do saw work in the basement or the garage, so I had to wait for another day. Meantime, the stove was up and running, ready for grilled cheese service:
The next day I was able to get out my jig saw and do the necessary cutting. Photos are courtesy of Maria, who was snapping some great pictures without me even really noticing at the time:
In this one I look like I'm about to trim down my own fingers... sorry, Grandma, it really was safer than it looks:
And that was it, although I was foolish enough not to take a picture of the finished job, just as I forgot to take a picture of the start. The stove is working beautifully and all of the cabinetry is back where it belongs. We also took the opportunity this week to replace our kitchen faucet, which had been leaking prodigiously and causing water to run down into the cabinet underneath. Never a dull moment!
Here's a preview of our next adventure from this weekend, which will be the subject of tomorrow's post:
For about four years now we've had a glass/ceramic electric cooktop in our kitchen, which replaced the Eisenhower-era stove that was in the house when we bought it. That one had a faulty burner on it, and bought itself a one-way trip to the landfill when the faulty burner caught fire. The fancy glass one was on clearance at Sears. We liked the smooth top, but grew to dislike the arduous cleaning process that followed every use.
One morning last week I was making lunches for the kids and discovered that the glass surface had cracked. It was a long thermal crack across two of the burners - meaning the surface material had weakened from many cycles of heating and cooling over the years. Sears offers a limited warranty on the surface itself, but you have to pay for the labor to replace it, and before you even get that far you have to pay $75 to have a technician come out, look at the crack, and decide whether it qualifies for the warranty coverage at all. Sears could send someone out the following week to have a look.
We like cooking and eating food just about every day, so for less than what the Sears rigamarole was going to cost me, I was able to buy a new cooktop. I installed the glass one when we bought it back in 2005, and so I installed this one too.
What I've learned about appliances over the years is that for the most part they're not very complicated - you have to be comfortable working with electrical components, and you have to be able to get the right parts when you're doing a repair. The Internet has been indispensable for providing part diagrams and step-by-step repair guidance. I've repaired our washer, dryer, fridge, and stove in the past couple years, probably saving us a lot of money in service calls.
Anyway, the new stove. The first order of business is getting the old one out of there, which means shutting off the circuit, pulling everything out of the cabinets underneath, unwiring the old unit from the electrical connection, and pulling it out. Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to snap a picture of my starting point, but here's how it looked when I got the old stove out of there:
Next, installing the new unit. You can see we went back to electric coils - they're becoming harder to get as the manufacturers shift to the higher-priced smooth surface models, but I didn't want the eventual hassle of another thermal crack, and anyway we're hoping to renovate the kitchen in a couple years, at which point we're going to convert to gas:
Wiring in the new stove was a snap - probably took less than ten minutes. Next order of business was to put everything back in place. I discovered that the drawers directly underneath the stove no longer fit in place, because the dimensions of the basin underneat the new stove were different from the old one.
The first drawer I put in won't close:
And this picture is blurry, but you can see what the leading edge of the drawer is just about 1/4" (0.6cm) too tall:
So I was going to have to trim the drawers. At this point I was out of daylight, and I'm not really set up to do saw work in the basement or the garage, so I had to wait for another day. Meantime, the stove was up and running, ready for grilled cheese service:
The next day I was able to get out my jig saw and do the necessary cutting. Photos are courtesy of Maria, who was snapping some great pictures without me even really noticing at the time:
In this one I look like I'm about to trim down my own fingers... sorry, Grandma, it really was safer than it looks:
And that was it, although I was foolish enough not to take a picture of the finished job, just as I forgot to take a picture of the start. The stove is working beautifully and all of the cabinetry is back where it belongs. We also took the opportunity this week to replace our kitchen faucet, which had been leaking prodigiously and causing water to run down into the cabinet underneath. Never a dull moment!
Here's a preview of our next adventure from this weekend, which will be the subject of tomorrow's post:
