The fridge was the one appliance we didn’t change our minds on. We bought the Kenmore 76233 21.7 model in stainless steel. Consumer Reports gave it a good review, and it has a stellar EnergyStar rating, so I was sold. It’s been very good so far. The freezer is ice-cold (it doesn’t play around, be warned) and the fridge is absolutely huge—two gallons of milk fit comfortably in the door, something I’ve never seen before. There’s a built-in water dispenser on the left side, and the filter produces cold, fresh water that tastes pure. However, because it’s set up with the thin plastic water hose used for most ice-cube makers, the water comes out slow, which means the door is open for a long time. Consider the next higher model with the dispenser built in on the outside, or another model with a true water dispenser.
Other than that small quibble, there’s nothing else to complain about. It’s quiet, huge, and worlds better than our old fridge.
So we went with the Kenmore 16279, in black. (The other model we’d picked out was unavailable.) So far, it’s working well; we’ve found that there are problems with spotting and haze on the glasses, and had to increase the water softener setting higher from the factory default to prevent etching. As with any appliance, we’re still learning its peculiarities, but overall, we like it. We’re also going to stick with the black front—after being told we could order a custom cabinet front mount, I called Kenmore and couldn’t get anyone on the phone to find the part. So be warned, folks-the Sears salesmen will advise you to go through Kenmore directly to save money, but Kenmore might not be able to help you.
If you have children, I’d recommend this one. The controls are on the top, which hides them under the granite of the countertop, away from little fingers. It has several different washing options (Turbo Wash being one of them) and when it’s operating, it’s very quiet.
After finishing most of the touch-up work in the kitchen, this weekend I moved out into the dining room. (Some history: the dining room has been unfinished since our first year in this house. We scraped wallpaper and pulled the lousy paneling off the walls before the wedding, pulled the carpeting up the night before our first Fourth of July party, and painted last fall. It’s been in stasis ever since.)
The strange hole in the front corner has been filled. There are two new baseboards installed and finished with cap molding, waiting for a fresh coat of paint. The other two will get new molding and a sanding before being painted—it’s hard to get a 17′ length of wood without having it specially cut—and the remaining nicks and dings in the wall are getting smoothed out.
I’m leaving the window as it is for a while, until we can afford a replacement—getting something architecturally accurate with modern construction is going to cost big bucks. Until then, we’ll cover over the holes with curtains and I’ll tack in the replacement molding.
Also, I covered the nasty paneling out on the front porch with three(!) coats of white Kilz to try and brighten the light coming in the front of the house. Years of nicotine have already burned through the paint and stained it brown.
With these two rooms done (or close to done), we’ll have three rooms on the ground floor completed, and we’ll be able to focus on the living room.
This is a link to a seller’s website. It’s information on the Beacon-Morris K84 , a forced hot-water heater used in minimum-space applications (e.g. under a cabinet, in recessed floor spaces) and destined for use in our kitchen. We’re using Schumacher & Seiler, a local Baltimore plumbing supply house, as our vendor (luckily, they have a warehouse not 5 miles from our house.)
Update: This will not work with our heating system, which is steam radiator based. From what we are told, it’s only compatible with gravity/hot water systems.
Looking for some good work music? Go pick up Richard Ashcroft’s Alone With Everybody. Melodic, relaxed rock, great vocals, outstanding production. Looking for something to laugh at after you watch the news? (“Don’t look at that war over there that we’re not winning. Don’t pay attention to those body counts, or that spiralling deficit or the thrumming beat of inflation, or our weakening dollar. Look to the sky. Look to…a new space program! Yeah, that’s it!” I call bullshit.) Go Get Your War On.
modern technology
Weapons Of Mass Confusion. The back panel of our new receiver scares me. It looks like the control room wall of a Russian nuclear power plant; it’s filled with ports and connectors and diagrams silk-screened onto the black metal that are supposed to “help” me figure out how to hook this thing up in audiophile-speak. There are whole 10-page chapters in the manual focused on subjects like “Plugging in Your Receiver” and “Attaching The FM Antenna.” I feel like I’m sitting down to an SAT again. Once I navigated through the dissertation on the six different types of cable it’s possible to use, (as far as I can tell, Optical > S-Video > Coax > RCA) and had a rudimentary understanding of where to put them (back in the bag with the receipt, because invariably I bought the wrong one), I turned to the chapters on “Using Your Tuner,” or “What Are All These Flashing Lights For?”, bypassing the volume on “Configuring Your Receiver” because I don’t have the required thirteen surround-sound speakers nor the patience to stab at the little buttons on the front panel.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love this thing, and I’m forever indebted to my sister for giving it to us for Christmas. It’s just that over the last ten years, in the absence of money and high-end audio equipment, I’m out of the loop on all this stuff. I’m thinking that the technology got a lot smarter and I got a lot dumber. I kind of feel like my parents when they are confronted with the blinking 12:00 display on the front of their VCR. Somewhere along the way this stuff got really complicated. There are seventeen different types of surround sound and a whole college-level course required to understand the differences. Not only do you have to drop a month’s salary on one component, you have to blow the Christmas bonus on the cabling to go with it. These days there’s interconnect wire thicker than my arm to connect your components; one foot of speaker wire is $3 and weighs heavier than anchor chain. After looking through the rows of boxes of gold-plated this and double-shielded that I found the normal section and picked up a regular S-video cable for the DVD player and a splitter to RCA-jack cable for the iPod. Grand total: $9.
Not much to write about today; I got a bad night’s sleep and I’m kind of groggy this afternoon. We have a new washing machine, although the hoses left in the house are leaky—a trip to the store will fix that. But we are celebrating, because both of us have piles of dirty laundry to wash about a mile high. Tomorrow, the BG&E guys should come back out to mark the panel in the basement, so then I can start deconstructing what goes where and updating it.
(spitting my vodka tonic out all over the keyboard.)
This is a great take on the current filesharing bullshit war, courtesy of Orson Scott Card (and /.)
Last night I spent about 45 minutes at the Lowe’s looking at the various and sundry refrigerators for sale. Life is not a simple choice of almond, white or yellow anymore; These days there’s brushed metal (a pain in the ass if you have kids; metal picks up fingerprints like sprinkles on ice cream) and black (who in their right mind buys a black fridge? you might as well just start pissing on the floor, because that’s not gonna help resell your house.) There’s also the added complication of the side-by-side vs. the over-under (or, to really complicate things, the top fridge and chest freezer underneath, a la my Grandma.) If we get the side-by-side, we can have the ice/water dispenser, negating our Brita and Pur pitchers. But Jen’s an over-under woman, which means we’ll be spending less (seems like the side-by-sides are $200 more, on average.)
In other news, this does not mean good things for our current project. After our team busted asses to develop a beautiful demo, the whole project was cancelled. Dammit.
The Phone company came by to fix my line- it smells like a problem on their end. The guy came in, tested the line, re-connected the outside wiring and we got a dialtone. He came downstairs, looked over my wiring job, told me I did a good job, and then tested the lines again with the phones plugged in- the line is perfect, no shorts or bad equipment. He told me he wasn’t going to write it up as an inside job. So, I’ll go home and continue the wiring job, and tackle all the coax next. Once all that is out of the way, we’ll focus on the network cabling.
Jeez, I forgot all about this. ho-ho.