Dishwasher Disaster
Gather around friends, it’s time for another weird house story!
The dishwasher was already ‘old’ when we bought this place nine years ago. But other than the fact that not all the buttons lit up properly, it worked just fine. So, we left it alone since there were other and more pressing house matters to attend to first.
Until last year, when our old dishwasher started dying a slow death. With falling apart rusted racks, buttons that didn’t activate the first press, and a dish tab holder that wouldn’t always pop open during the wash cycle, requiring us to run it a second time, we decided it was time to put the old gal out to pasture so to speak. We buckled up our big kid pants and hit the early Black Friday sales to snag a new dishwasher that still cost more than I was hoping to spend.
Of course, that was only the beginning of our woes. Most new dishwashers come with a plug that you can pop in, and voila! But having an old house means ours is hard-wired instead of plugged in, and the big box stores won’t touch that with a 39 1/2-ft. pole. Too many risks – which I get. It’s still a bit of a pain because it meant we had to shop around for an installer which meant more money to put out.
The contractors who did our windows supplied an electric and plumbing team to take care of our dishwasher installation. New dishwasher? Check. Installer? Check. Problem solved right? But of course, nothing can be that easy and the money pit house struck again!
What was supposed to be an easy 2-hour job instead became an all-day fiasco. I can’t even begin to describe the hot mess express we discovered in the basement. The short version is the previous owner had created his own hodgepodge connector from the plumbing to the dishwasher instead of using standard parts. (Don’t ask me what that means because I’m clueless about all things plumbing. All I know is that it was not good.) On top of that, the pipes were leaking so then every time we ran our dishwasher, it was dripping into the basement. Double yikes!
On the plus side – if you can call it that – we have a beautiful new dishwasher that works and new plumbing in the basement. Despite the extra extra cost, it was worth it. We hope and pray nothing else goes belly up in the next few months to give our wallets a chance to recover!
