Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The Dishwasher Debacle

I have a new dishwasher!! Sort of. It's not really new, and it's not quite working. My wonderful friend Jay works maintenance for some housing units and had a perfectly good dishwasher that was being replaced. (Your tax dollars at work - never repair what can be replaced.) He brought the dishwasher to my house Monday night and partially installed it.

I say partially because the dishwasher I previously had was so old it was "hard-plumbed" into the water line. New dishwashers don't hook up like that and I don't have spare dishwasher parts laying around, so he did what he could and explained what else I needed. He cut out all the old pipes, hooked up the electricity and anchored it to the cabinets. He even changed the door color to white to match the rest of my appliances. A free dishwasher, labor on the install and he hauled away my old one. My old one was solid metal and very, very heavy. Remind me to bake him some cookies.

So last night I ran to Home Depot to pick up the remaining stuff, and convinced a very sweet co-worker of mine, Steffan, to stop by and help me with the rest. Unfortunately, despite Jay's instructions, I bought the wrong size compression fitting. So Steffan hooked up the flexible hose to the dishwasher (no small feat) and balanced it all. He also explained exactly what I need, and showed me how to finish it once I get the right sized piece. I'm not very good at visualizing the abstract, so it really helped when he was able to show me using the wrong sized pieces. Suddenly it made much more sense.

Gotta luv a three day dishwasher installation. :)

Tonight - a candlelight Christmas concert at Powell Symphony Hall performed by the Bach Society.

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