May I speak with you upstairs for a minute?

I have strayed from my base a bit, but today I am back in full force.

That's right. I'm choreblogging. You all know that's why you follow along so closely. You just can't guess what wacky project that CherkyB feller will get up to next.

Well, fear not. I have not just one, but two projects to talk about today. And with pictures!

So youse all remember the problem I had with the old dishwasher? How it had a hole in the bottom? In case not, here's a picture:

Haaa! I kill me! It's like prom night all over again, as they say.

Yes, but seriously, that wonderful patch that I devised to fix the hole in the bottom of the plastic dishwasher tub using QuikSteel managed to last all of three days before it popped the hell off. So The Mrs. declared that she simply couldn't live in a house where she had to continuously worry that the dishwasher was going to leak all over the floor, and decreed that a new dishawasher we shall have.

That's the problem with trophy wives, by the way, in case any of you single guys are thinking of getting married. All they do is demand, demand, demand. They're worse than Democrats.

Ok, maybe I got carried away there. They aren't really worse than Democrats. But they're a damn close second.

Given that I take direction poorly (and the fact that all my web searching had noted that no one had the dishwasher I wanted in stock, and the special order time was two weeks), I mixed up a batch of JB Weld and dolloped it generously in and around the hole. JB Weld, however, takes 15 hours to cure, so I had plenty of time to head to Lowe's to order a dishwasher.

I got the model that was the closest approximation to the dishwasher I put into our last house, as we were quite happy with that one. But that was almost eight years ago, so they weren't really completely identical. In particular, the little contdouwn timer that we used to have that would simply display random numbers until it eventually finished washing has been eliminated.

The trouble with these modern dishwashers is they have all kinds of temperature and dirt sensors that constantly update the wash cycle. And if you put a digital readout on the front of the dishwasher that is supposed to represent "minutes remaining", it goes up and down every time the sensors adjust something, and in the five years we had that dishwasher, I don't think it ever came within a half hour of taking the amount of time it said it would when it was started.

The dishwasher was delivered at 7:50am today. Yeah. 7:50am on a Saturday. And they called at 7:30am to say they were on their way. Included in the delivery was carting off the old one, so on Friday night I had removed the dishwasher. It was then that I discovered that the shutoff valve for the dishwasher didn't quite 100% shut off the water. So I stuck the hose in that bucket. It wasn't until the next morning that I discovered that the valve slowly opened just a little bit more over the course of about a half hour after being shut off. It did this quite reliably. The amount of water that dribbled into the bucket overnight would never have gotten halfway up, but when the valve opened itself a bit more, it managed to overflow the bucket sometime near the morning.


All projects begin so happily. I like to call this picture "Hope for Change."


"SOS" means "special order service" in this context. That tells them not to sell my dishwasher to someone else, I guess.

Now, I have owned three houses over my many years, and in each one The Mrs. has insisted I install a nicer dishwasher. So I know it is supposed to be easy. But I also know it never really is. So I approached this project with great trepidation. That is, until I got the new dishwasher out of the box.

See, my old dishwasher was a Kenmore. A number of different companies make dishwashers for Sears to sell under the Kenmore label, but I happened to know this one was a Whirlpool because it had a soap dispenser that was exactly like the one in the KitchenAid we had in our last house (the dishwasher we liked, as opposed to the Bosch I put into the first house cuz Consumer Reports said it was the best, but then it broke three times (twice for the same thing) in its first two years and it never really got the dishes that clean, plus it was impossible to clean the sieves). The new dishwasher, being a close approximation of the last house's dishwasher, was also a KitchenAid. KitchenAids are just higher-end Whirlpools, but imagine my eleation when I discovered that the underneath was laid out identically to the Kenmore I had removed. Sure, the motor was different, and the tub was different, but the locations and sizes were all identical assuring that all the hookups (water, drain, electric) would go right on without any reconfig.

Wonderful. CherkyB catches a break. It went in quite smoothly. See:


Except for that hose sticking out the front. The new hose was a little stiff and didn't want to tuck under and stay there. The kickplate, though, held it in nicely once installed.

All shiny and new.


These little blue jet do-jobbers in the back are a recent innovation. They're called "Proscrub," and you can lay the back row of tines in the bottom rack back at about 45 degrees and then stack up really dirty pots and pans facing the Proscrub jets. I cannot report on if they work yet, as they're running right now, but the lady in the store said, "people don't agree on if they are any good."

A hell of a glowing endorsement.


The front panel has lots of little blue LEDs. They match the overn nicely.


Now, the second project has a lot fewer pictures. When I went to turn off the water to the old dishwasher prior to removal, I noticed that there was a lot of water under the sink. I discovered that the faucet was leaking from somewhere up inside its body. So, probably this could have been fixed by a new cartridge or valve stem packing or o-rings, but the faucet was cracked when we moved in and never really worked all that well. So I just replaced the whole thing. This is a finish called "Tuscon Bronze", which means it's painted bronze with black paint over it that has been brushed off around the edges to expoe the bronze.