Friday, July 14, 2006

Our new stove

G and I are becoming more like adults all the time. First, we get jobs, then we buy a house, then we rip the house apart (that doesn't sound very adult-like, does it?), and now, we've bought an appliance.

We have a new renter in the cottage, and she let us know that the burner pans on the stove needed to be replaced. I bought new pans, but they turned out to be the wrong kind, and it was a little bit of an ordeal to find the right ones. We finally found them at Home Depot. But do you know what else Home Depot has? New stoves. With new burner pans included. And why spend $15 on burner pans when you could spend a few hundred on a whole new appliance?

Sounds a little rash, doesn't it? Our justification was that the cottage stove was pretty old and nasty and would need to be replaced at some point, probably soon. And to justify it further, we shopped around and ended up getting a great deal on the stove you see there (or one that looks just like it) at a scratch and dent place.

The scratch and dent appliance store is not in our home town, but I happened to need to go to that town (or near it anyway) last weekend. So I made a little detour to price stoves. Our idea was that we would only buy from the discount place if it was significantly cheaper than Home Depot since we like the convenience of easy returns if something goes wrong.

Turns out I got a great deal on a slightly beat up (but only on the sides, which will be hidden by cabinets) name brand stove. Woo hoo! The purchase was quite an experience. The salespeople at this store are like no salespeople I've ever seen. They don't dress nice (the uniform appears to be shorts, tennis shoes, and untucked t-shirts with "I love refrigerators" on the back), they aren't necessarily looking out for the best interest of the store (my salesman told me he regularly buys cheap appliances from the store and then resells them for a profit on ebay), and they aren't nice all the time (my salesman almost spit on me when I told him I didn't want his extended warranty).

But it worked out fine. We have a nice new stove that I can't operate properly yet. Oh, I think I forgot to tell you that this cheap stove is nicer than the one in our house, so we put our stove in the cottage, and we have the new stove. It works great, I just haven't figured out some of the details of the oven controls. I'm used to a dial and that's it. I'm sure I'll get it.

When I was standing outside the discount appliance place waiting for the stove to be loaded, I happened to glance at the exterior of the building. It is textured concrete blocks, but they've been painted. My guess is that it was a cheap paint job, because as I was aimlessly staring at the wall, I noticed a different texture in a couple of places. When my consciousness caught up, I realized it was gum. They had painted over gum.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you determined the gender of "cheap stove" and have you named him/her? We once had a yellow one named "baby quack." :) (Little wonder this one is anonymous!)