My wife (My Wife!) and I have been talking for a while about replacing the crappy four-burner electric stove that came with the house. Fortunately, it's a standalone oven / cooker, which as it isn't built into the work surfaces would be comparatively simple to replace. However, as I mentioned below, we're keen to move to gas hobs rather than the awful electric ones we have.
So a few weeks ago, we were out for coffee and a few basic errands (I was buying pants, if you must know), and whilst the Kiwi was in a girl shop doing girl things, I wandered a few doors down to where a local appliance store was having the final weekend of a closing down sale. It was like appliance deal heaven in there, and I looked further in and found a five-burner gas / electric oven for around $2,000 off, which was intriguing. I pulled the Kiwi in and pointed this out. A sales assistant materialised, and offered a number of compelling things - free delivery, interest free credit, that sort of thing.
So we bought it. Despite the following:
- We have no mains gas at our house
- The five-burner stove is somewhat wider than our four-burner one, and thus slightly wider than the gap our cupboards allow
- The addition of a differently-sized oven will require a differently-sized rangehood, and thus a new hole in the wall in a slightly different place
Carpe diem, and all that. So once the thing was safely ensconced in our downstairs spare bedroom, we set about getting quotes to have it installed. Fortunately, we found out that the current rangehood, whilst slightly offset for the new oven, was actually within compliance codes and wouldn't have to be replaced right away. This is good as they're expensive, and I imagined that cutting a new hole in our expensive cedar external wall and filling the old one in would also be somewhat costly.
So we found a gasfitter who'll pipe bottled gas in from outside, remove one of the kitchen cupboards, install the oven and put some cheap glaze over the back wall for not a reasonable sum.
Thing is, that cheap glaze was proving a bit of a challenge. The thinking behind doing it cheaply was that we're probably going to get the rest of the kitchen done sooner or later so we didn't want to put anything too permanent in. However, it's probably not going to be this year, so it does need to look reasonable. This prompted us to look at a nice steel splashback this weekend whilst we were looking at how cheap the cheap wall glaze actually was (the answer was 'very'). We decided on one, and I diligently measured it to ensure it would fit under our existing rangehood - remember we'd decided not to replace the current one.
We had my car with us at the time (two seater roadster), so we headed home to pick up the Kiwi's car (estate (sorry 'sport') wagon) and to measure up. I took the bigger car, returned, and bought the splashback. Job done.
This evening, the Kiwi asked 'did you measure the rangehood in the end?'. Cue small moment of discomfort from your author. I had not, having been distracted by a toasted sandwich on our return home.
As it turns out, the splashback we have bought is about 15cm too tall for the current rangehood, which means that not only will we have to buy a new one in order to get our oven installed, we'll have to have it fitted, which is no small task.
I suspect that our gasfitter finds this all highly amusing. As does my wife.
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