Almost four years ago we moved home to Arizona from Washington DC. We had decided we were going to renovate our rental house for us to live in and started the project prior to our 40 hour drive across the country. We walked in to this:

More than once we had a “Oh sh*t. What have we started??” moment. But the house came together beautifully and 9 months after we started, we ended up with this:

We had only minor snafus along the way – one of them being the dishwasher installation. Because we were total novices at remodeling a house and managing the contractor and the sub contractors, supplies (we learned the hard way to buy our own materials and hire someone to install them) and the physical work we did ourselves, we didn’t catch that we had measured the hight for the dishwasher from the sub-floor rather than the tiled floor. And when you’re using 1 inch thick and extremely inconsistent sized Saltillo tile, this is an issue. Long story short, we had to chip out the tile under the counter and in front in order to get the dishwasher in place. This resulted in a very serious condition called Appliance Attitude.

Yes, the damn thing developed a negative attitude towards work because he knew that he had job security. Often at night I would hear Dishwasher chuckling as I loaded up dirty dishes. Then in the morning when they were still dirty he would mumble under his breath “What are you going to do about it, lady? Chip out all the tile, haul me away, put in a new dishwasher, relay the tile and then seal it?? I don’t think so!! Mmmmwwwaaahhhaaaahhh!!”. Dirty bastard. And the worst part was he was right – it was way too much work to get a new dishwasher. So I called the factory service – who were no help. I changed detergents and even – gasp – washed the dishes before putting them in to be washed. Some of it helped, but not enough. So this past Christmas, we decided it was time. We were going to do the work and get something that actually cleaned our dishes instead of just making them appear clean but smell funny.

And that’s when it happened. Dishwasher decided he wasn’t going out in handcuffs, he was going out in a body bag.

Tuesday night I was settling into bed and Peter was working out on the couch when we both heard a very loud and ominous BANG. He came flying into the bedroom saying that he thought someone had thrown something at our front window. We both proceeded to investigate and Peter proceeded to ignore my snarky comments questioning why someone would choose to break the front window rather than one of the two glass doors on either side of the window to get into our house.  We settled on the dishwasher and when we opened it, we were greeted with a plume of smoke and steam. Not to mention all of the “clean” dishes were covered in a crunchy white substance. There was the telltale sign of a problem in the bottom of the dishwasher – a tube thingy was split wide open and a wire was hanging out – it reminded me of the Sad Mac face with two X’s for eyes and it’s tongue hanging out.

And so the process begins. The handy man is coming today to chip out the tile – the new super fancy and tested by my mom dishwasher comes tomorrow and by Saturday night, we’ll be washing dishes like normal people. And by sometime next week we won’t have a giant, tile-less section in our floor.

I did ask the salesman if the installation people who will be hauling away our POS would let me kick it – he didn’t laugh. There’s probably now a note in the delivery instructions to beware the crazy homeowner.