Year 2 - Day 258

World's sexiest oven!

















And we can do all this with it!

Electricians came yesterday to finish up the electrical and move the downlight that is too close to the crown molding over the fridge. On the phone the guy had said that he'd likely have to cut a big square out of the (new) ceiling to retreive the "new construction" downlight and move it. Mark Briganti, our kitchen installer, suggested abandoning the offending light fixture in the ceiling and cutting a new hole and putting in an "old work" downlight. We'd obviously pay for the $75 fixture that we were abandoning and the new fixture but it would save us having to cut the ceiling and patch a 16" square hole. Seemed worth it to me and when I went back downstairs to suggest it to the electrician his face lit up with the thought. "Man, I wish we had more customers like you," his assitant said nicely. Apparently any chance to not cut loads of sheetrock and get covered in plaster dust is a good thing for them. Rob, the main electrician had one concern in that the trim on the light fittings might not match but it did so I only had to patch the round hole left from the old fixture rather than a huge hole and I used the 5" circle he cut for the new one to do that.

So that was one small victory. Another part of the day was wiring in the double oven. The thing weighed a ton, 345lbs the paperwork said, and we had to get the thing over to the oven cabinet so he could wire it in. I asked if he would actually install it and he said "oh no, it's too heavy and Orlando (his assistant) can't lift anything". Fine, no worries the installer could install it but we had to get it over to the cabinet so it could be wired in. The electrician mentioned a dolly and I popped out to the U-Haul that is just about a mile down the road and rented a flat dolly for $7 for the day. I also remembered some lifting straps (those cheesy "Forearm Forklifts" you see advertised on TV, which, it turns out aren't that cheesy after all) that I had bought when I bought the U-Haul moving blankets to protect the floors.
I came home and for some bizarre reason I actually read the oven installation instructions before we installed it rather than whilst standng in front of it installed scratching my head as to why there was one bracket left over.
These instructions had good advice: "remove doors, fix levels and racks before lifting to reduce weight." Seeing as there was a possibility that I might be the one helping with the lifting this seemed a good idea. So I removed both oven doors with the flick of a lever and a gentle tug and the oven racks and then I removed the side rails that hold the racks. Curious, I hopped on the bathroom scale with one door - 40lbs! - so all-in-all that dropped at least 100lbs off the weight of the oven, maybe more.
I mentioned to Bob on the phone what we were doing and maybe he and I could install the oven when he got home and then later the electrician said we would do it. So we lifted the oven onto the dolly and wheeled it across the kitchen effortlessly. Infact it was now so light that we didn't really need the dolly and the electrician and I could quite easily have waltzed around the kitchen with that thing.
Couple of pilot holes later and I had the brackets installed and then we slid it into place, powered her up and she came to life like something from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The clock is on all the time but when you touch the panel it lights up on a ramp up kind of lighting gradually but quickly going from off to glowing in a second or two.

Doors back on and racks and everything in and SHE IS A BEAUTY!!