In my introduction I state that this house will be "less of the "how are we going to make dinner without a functioning kitchen" type of place. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case.
As I have mentioned previously, the c. 1950 Crown gas stove that came with the house was pretty much DOA. As such, my amazing wife has been preparing meals using a single electric burner, a microwave, and a toaster oven. She's been doing an impressive job of it, too.
We've been making very slow progress on this front, primarily because none of the options are especially attractive. We haven't had much luck finding a replacement stove on Craigslist or eBay - the closest decent contenders have been in Chicago, Illinois, 350 miles away. The cheapest new 40" gas stove is $1600. Putting a narrower stove between the two cabinets would probably be ugly. And while there's a certain novelty to installing two 20 inch apartment stoves, that doesn't seem quite right either.
So we're waiting and hemming and hawing. If you have a 40" white (or even some other color - just not stainless) gas stove that is in good operating condition, and hasn't been sitting in your basement for the past three decades, I may be interested, if you're within 300 miles of us. Of course, we're probably just going to wait some more, as my wife bakes Christmas cookies two at a time in the toaster oven.
In other news, last night I tried to hook up the water line for our new refrigerator. A. had, at my request, purchased a 10' icemaker hook up kit. I pulled out the old copper line, which had been crushed, and enlarged the hole. I hooked the hose up to the refrigerator, and, with a great deal of difficulty, used the old copper line to thread it through the floor. I threaded it under the existing pipes in the basement (note: proximity to the hot water line may be an issue) and came up short. My hope was that the location of the refrigerator was the issue, so I pushed it back into place. Nope - still about 8" short.
I hoped that I'd be able to buy a new line, just a bit longer, with all the fittings at the store today, but alas, they are not avaiable longer than 10'. I guess it's just a matter of waiting for it to do the plumbing work itself.
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3 comments:
::empathic sigh::
HAve you heard about Chambers stoves? I bought one in working condition to restore, but I haven't had a chance to reassemble it yet... The stoves are 37" wide and have a built in crock-pot cooker (called a Thermowell), three burners, and a broiler/griddle in the cooktop. They're reputed to be very fuel efficient, which is somewhat unusual in an old stove. Check out http://www.chamberstoves.net for some more info and pictures. I also have a few pics of mine on my site.
Di - the thing is, we really really want a 40" stove - if we are going to build a tiny cabinet to fit in the space between the stove and the existing cabinets, we'll probably buy a new 36" stove. Also, the Chambers stoves, from what I can tell, tend to be pretty expensive.
We like the look of some of the Crown stoves that we've seen, but given all the issues with the Crown we have right now, and the lack of someone who can repair it locally, it's not terribly tempting.
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