31

Well today I am 31, which, despite what anyone might tell you, is nothing like being 15½ twice. Ok, so I don’t really remember what 15½ felt like, but I wouldn’t believe them anyway.

I don’t remember what present I might have been excited about at 15½ but I can tell you that if you had asked me to make a list of 1,000 items I would have liked for my birthday, there would have been no appliances anywhere on the list.

Well, a lot can happen in 15½ years. You are now looking at my present for my 31st birthday (not Ethan, behind Ethan). For those of you who are really into appliances, you will recognize this immediately as a Maytag Precision Touch Control 500 Electric Smoothtop. For those of you who aren’t really into appliances, you are probably still thinking it is pretty pathetic that I’m excited about an appliance.

But let me explain.

We have not had a properly functioning stove in seven years, if ever. In 1995 we moved into our first apartment in Princeton (which is another story altogether) and I really don’t remember much about that stove except for the small fire that time I made fried chicken from scratch.

In 1997 we moved to our second apartment in Princeton (technically I believe we were in West Windsor, but we had a Princeton address). This was our singular experience with a gas stove, which was great in that it did not require pre-heating time, but it ran hot and there was much cookie burnage during that year.

August 1998 brought us to our first house in Gainesville house, which we loved in most every way except the kitchen which we eventually painted (before / after) and made a lot better. But there was one thing that remained a problem: the stove.

Let’s talk about the stove for a minute… or more. The stove had one large burner and 3 small ones. The oven ran 50 - 70 ° F hotter than it was set for (but not consistently). Then there was the day that the one large burner exploded.

Yup. Exploded. From the inside out. While Tracey was cooking something. Blew a hole through the burner coil and the skillet.

That was just the beginning. First we tried to replace the burner coils and couldn’t. I mean physically couldn’t. We tried to remove the old recently exploded coil, but the stove would not release its fiendish clutches on the traitorous beast. Eventually we called in an electrician. This electrician took about 3 weeks to find a replacement coil for the stove, and took almost an hour to replace it.

“So if you hated it so much, why didn’t you just replace it?”

A fair and excellent question. Short answer: We couldn’t. Literally, we could not replace the oven. If you look closely at the picture of the stove you will see that it was built-in. Yes, built-in. A horribly bad idea, you say? Why yes, I would agree. What could be worse than a built-in stove? Perhaps a built-in defective (demonically possessed?) stove? Oh no, my friend, you are missing one aspect entirely: width.

Stoves in the USA are 30 inches across. It’s a standard, and standards are good, ever since Eli Whitney we have appreciated standards for one simple reason: interchangeability (I said simple reason, not a short one). I suppose you can already guess that the stove from the nether realms was not 30 inches. Nor 29. Nor 28. Nor 27 — oh wait, yeah, 27. 27 inches. Which is 3 inches less. Even if you were not good at math, home ec, geometry, or interior design, you probably realize that replacing a 27 inch stove with a 30 inch stove poses a slight problem. You have to come up with 1½ inches on either side. It just so happened that there was about 1½ inches between the end of the stove and the beginning of the drawers and cabinets. So no go there.

Apparently this built-in stove was only done in 1967, the year that our house was built.

So we were not able to replace the stove. Ripping it out would have meant totally renovating the kitchen, which we were not ready to do, which isn’t a bad thing, since we moved only about 2 years after the kichen was repainted.

sigh

We arrived at the new house with a veritable kitchen-full of new appliances: fridge, microwave, dishwasher, washer, and dryer. Ok, well the washer and dryer aren’t in the kitchen, but imagine if they were, that kitchen would be even more full. We lacked one thing: a stove. The stove seemed to work, it didn’t explode, for one thing. However, the front large burner seems to have a mind of its own, and it tends to be a bit sleepy. Not to mention that burners on electric stoves always look ugly and dirty.

On our way home Friday, Tracey had a revelation as to what she and Dad could get me for my birthday. “A new stove!” she said with discernably glee at having come up with an idea. She had picked up a flyer while we were waiting for lunch and saw that they were having a sale on Saturday. My idea was that we could go on Friday and see if there was anything we really wanted for the Saturday sale, and perhaps they would be willing to sell it to us on Friday since we were there and ready to buy.

Of course there are about 50 different models of stoves which all look remarkably similar.

“I want a smooth top,” Tracey announced. I resisted the urge to point out whose birthday was approaching, mainly because I agreed with her and I say enough dopey things during the course of the week that I thought I might skip one.

“What’s the difference between the $750 and the $650 and the $550 models?” I asked.

“Or the $450 model?” Tracey said, having looked over to the next row and locked onto a different model with her eagle bargain-hunter eyes.

Family members and those who know us will know we’re all about a good deal. I don’t mind spending money on something if it is worth it, but if we can get a good deal, well, all the better.

Tracey spotted a different tag on one unit. Now in Junior High, being markedly different is cause for teasing and scorn, but when shopping for applianced, being marked differently usually means a discount of some sort. Sure enough, Tracey, with the keen instincts of a cheetah preparing to pick off the weakest member of a pack of gazelles, had spotted a slightly injured member of the appliance tribe. There was a small sized section of the porcelain at the top of the stove which had come off, resulting in a price reduction of over $200.

Original Price:	$699
Sale Price:	$649
Scratch and Dent Price:	$420
After Coupon from Flyer which started this whole process in the first place:	$410

Even after we added the 5-year protection plan (I am all about a bargain, and then not having to worry about if something goes wrong with the item in question) we paid less for the stove than we would have at full sticker price.

So there were really two presents, the stove, and the deal…. actually, three, if you count a happy spouse.

You might think that was enough for one day, but no gentle reader, there is more.

My original plan was nothing more than sweeping out the garage. One side of the garage (and I won’t say whose side, but intrepid readers may guess) had accumulated a pile of sand/dirt underneath one person’s Saturn VUE. Then Tracey told me that we had missed the free dump day where we were planning to get rid of the old dishwasher which has been in the garage since approximately 5 days after we moved into the house in June.

But one thing led to another, and the next thing you know we were cleaning out the entire garage. Things that were thought lost were found…. then again, things that were thought to have been thrown out were also found. Tracey called the trash company to ask if they would haul away the old dishwasher and an old dresser. “SURE!” said the chipper girl who answered the phone.

Then I started wondering if the guys who delivered the stove would take the old dishwasher away, and we ended up moving the dresser so we could use it as storage space (it has drawers). Instead we have several other large and heavy items to be removed, like several 5 gallon buckets of joint compound and other stuff that was left over from the previous owners. Tracey was imagining the conversation with the trash company on Monday when they arrive…

“Yeah, I called to ask if they would take the dresser and dishwasher, and they said sure… and by ‘dresser and dishwasher’ I really meant ‘All this miscellaneous crud that was here when we bought the house.’”

Really, there ought to be a free period to throw away some crud left by the previous owners, and that free period ought to extend to the first time that you really have a chance to clean out the garage 9 months after you move in.

Ethan, as you can see above, was quite the helper. He loves to sweep, probably because he sees his mother doing it all the time. He actually insisted on using the broom that I was using, so I had to go get another one. He saw me wiping off cobwebs from the walls, so he started wiping down the walls too… Of course he was easily distracted by finding various balls and seeing his Big Wheel, which, I am shocked to say, he is now nearly big enough to ride by pushing the pedals. That was quite a sight to see… he just needs another inch or two in leg length and he’ll be tooling around the driveway like nobody’s business. We also put together the slide from the Aiellos and he had great fun playing on that as well.

Anyway, the afternoon of hard work paid off, here is the garage now:

And in fact it’s even better than it appears, because a bunch of the stuff on the right (last picture) is going in the rummage sale, and the big big box to the right of the door (middle picture) has the deck table and chairs that we plan to put together soon. So there will be even more room. There is enough room for Dad to open the passenger door to my car without hitting anything (YAY!).

So that’s the way I turned 31… I bought a kitchen appliance and cleaned my garage… I suppose a lot of folks might find that bland, but at one point on Friday while sweeping out the garage I thought to myself “You know, there are a lot of people who would love to have a garage and a kitchen of their own.” Since then I’ve felt pretty fortunate for what we have, and cleaning the garage almost felt like a privilege rather than a chore.