Appliance shopping

We shopped for our appliances in early January, and it was about the most fun there is. Like the proverbial kids in a candy store, we had a wonderful time.

We did not go to your standard appliance store like Sears or Lowe's, but to a specialty kitchen supply store that caters only to contractors and their customers. They do not sell to the general public.

Our first question was whether we could get a range that had gas burners but an electric oven. We much prefer cooking with gas, but felt an electric oven would bake and broil more consistently. The solution was not to do this with a single range but with two elements, a gas cooktop and a separate built-in electric oven. You see where people have done this, putting the cooktop on the island and the wall oven(s) somewhere completely different. Our kitchen's current work triangle is fine as it is, so we will have them in the same place as the standard range, just as two separate pieces.

The other question was whether a 36” cooktop would fit over a 30” oven. A standard range is 30”, but we wanted five burners which don't really fit on a 30” cooktop. The fifth burner is more like a “tortilla warmer,” which is completely useless. They will fit, but the oven will have cabinet spacers to take up the extra room below the cooktop.

Having settled all that, we found an oven that we both fell in love with. It's Electrolux, a brand that's known in Europe but starting to catch on here (I just saw a TV commercial for it last night). The interior is royal blue (I know, it will get dirty just as fast as the black/gray interiors!) and the racks slide smoothly on drawer-type rails instead of the usual fingernails-on-a-blackboard. It's convection, so we figure we'll have to learn to cook all over again. And we couldn't resist all the one-button controls like warming, bread-rising, and Perfect Turkey. Perfect turkey? Maybe we won't have to cook at all—just put the food in, tell the oven what it is, and let it do the rest!

Next was the cooktop with five burners. Might as well get everything to match, and Electrolux has a good cooktop—the largest burner has 18,000 BTUs, a far cry from the 10 or 12 thousand of our standard range. It will be nice for the big stock pot and saute pan. And the smallest burner is very small, so flames won't lick up the sides of the really small pots.

We had already decided on a French-door refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom. That just seems much more efficient, not just for fuel efficiency but for our own bending and stooping. And the double doors on the upper part avoid blocking the traffic the way a wide single door would. Electrolux has one of those to match as well.

Finally the dishwasher, also an Electrolux. Our main priority was a quiet dishwasher. With the kitchen such an integral part of the family room, especially once the peninsula is gone, we do not want to have to turn up the volume on movies or television to a deafening level just to hear them over the dishwasher. To get a quiet dishwasher, it turns out, you have to go with a steel interior. The plastic ones are, by their nature, going to be noisy. So it's steel, which of course also means dollars.

The microwave is the only appliance not Electrolux. We went with GE on that because they have one that is shallower and will fit better with the cabinet layout. The only place we could have put the deeper Electrolux microwave would have been in the island, which our contractor discouraged and we didn't think worked very well either. Who wants to stand on their head to get things in or out of the microwave?

So, a very fun shopping experience. The Electrolux is a bit spendy, about the same as a high-end GE. At least we didn't fall in love with Viking or Wolf!

Today we are one step closer to Construction. We are having a pre-construction meeting next week, then Construction is tentatively scheduled to start the following Monday, March 29^th. Yow!