It's Always *Something*

When Gareth first moved in with me, we made a deal: I would cook and he would do the dishes.

Unfortunately, I never bothered to specify that dishes should be done immediately after the meal we had eaten. Gareth never felt a need to do dishes until we had none left to use; I usually broke down and did them long before that point.

Sure, there were times when I would try to win a power struggle and would ignore the resulting piles of dishes, pots and pans that accumulated in the sink and tiny counterspace. But all that accomplished was a bigger, messier mess that I would just end up having to clean anyway.

Before we had a kid, doing those dishes was the thing we argued about most.

The fighting ended when we finally moved into our house, which had a built-in dishwasher. I no longer had to bother my husband with that silly agreement about the dishes. It was simpler just to rinse them and load the thing myself.

I think that dishwasher saved our marriage.

But six months ago, it died on us. The repairman concluded that fixing it would just be a waste of time and money. We needed to buy a new one.

In the meantime, I'm back to washing dishes manually. By myself. And now there are three people in the house instead of two. And two of them insist on dragging out a new dish, new silverware for every little snack they eat. And they eat a lot.

I keep buying paper plates and plastic cutlery, but I am the only one in the house who ends up using them.

I'm at the end of my rope.

We almost bought a new one back in August. That's when our refrigerator also died on us. We all agreed the need for a fridge was more pressing, so we ended up buying that instead. And so I've continued to do all the dishes manually while waiting for end of the year bonuses.

It's now that time. I had selected my model, a nice quiet Bosch with adjustable trays. My sister just put a new kitchen in at her home and this is the one she selected. You can barely tell when it's running, which would be a nice thing as our house is small and noise in the kitchen carries into the bedroom, so that I never used to have the option of running the old Hotpoint model at night when Gareth was trying to sleep.

I finally hopped on over to Pacific Sales in Woodland Hills (recommended by my friend Tim) to purchase the thing. And as I was signing the credit card slip, the saleslady asked me an important question: "Have you ever put a new floor into your kitchen?"

Well, yes. Last year we replaced the ugly, peeling white vinyl with nice ceramic tile, at the same time that we traded in our ugly, shredded wall-to-wall carpet with hardwood in a rich shade of brown. It's the only improvement we made to the house that someone would actually notice. Up until then, the things we had done had been extremely expensive emergencies: a new sewer line, a new air conditioning/furnace, stuff like that.

"I hope your installer was smart enough to move the existing dishwasher out before putting the floor in," she said. "Dishwashers are the only appliance we sell that come in standard sizes - but if you put in a new floor, you might have some trouble getting the old one out and putting the new one in."

I was not at all sure our installer was that smart. There are problems with our wood floor, which became apparent only a couple of weeks after we got it. We've been haggling with the store that sold us the wood ever since. Everyone agrees there's a problem, but there's some dispute over who's at fault -- is it a manufacturing defect, or bad installation? And so who is going to pay to rip it out and put in a new one?

At one point, it was suggested that the fault was ours -- or at least, a defect in our home. An inspector suspected we had a leak under the house. We pored over our water bills for the last three years and could find no pattern. We spent $500 on a plumber to investigate our property with sonar equipment. There is no leak.

When I got home, I measured the opening for the dishwasher, and sure enough, it's a half-inch too small for the Bosch.

I called the saleslady back to tell her the news.

"Let's see what we have that might fit," she said.

The good news: There is a model that will work. It is said to be as quiet as the one I'd picked out. Of course, the bad news is that it costs $400 more.

I cancelled the sale until Gareth is back in town. At this point, my dream of having a dishwasher by Christmas wasn't going to happen anyway.

I just got a big stack of paper plates at Costco.

Comments

[M&Co.]

Oh man what a bummer! I would be nice to have a better dishwasher but $400 better, yikes!

[Mary]

6 months without a dishwasher?!?! That would send me to the loony bin, which is surprising because up until last year I never had a dishwasher in my adult life. Funny what you get used to, huh?

Good luck! I hope you're able to justify your purchase. I doubt you'll regret it once you have it.

[sweetney]

i loathe doing dishes AND cooking. so were i in your position, i'd be breaking out the large, economy-sized package of paper plates... while ordering in.

then i'd write a manual detailing my experience: "how to destroy the environment, become obese, AND go broke while you do it!"

i'm just that good.

[Liz]

Oh, that's so sad!!!

Hope it works out... :)

[ComfortAddict]

As one who does the dishes and most of the cooking (although no one has been cooking much lately), kick Gareth for me. There's no reason that he shouldn't share in the household chores.

By the way, we have a Bosch dishwasher and we love it.