Kitchen Update: Choosing Appliances

Our kitchen progress has stalled a bit since our difficult but ultimately victorious demo day.  I’ve never pretended to be a quick decorator!  A lot of this delay was caused by me, and in particular my full absorption in a particularly busy time at work, which isn’t interesting to talk about on a DIY blog.

What is hopefully at least a little interesting to talk about is the other source of delay: our difficulty coming together on a choice of new kitchen appliances.

Remember that this is where we’re starting from:

So there is really no where to go but up.  However, we had really different visions of which “up” we wanted to go, so we began…

The Great Appliance Stalemate of 2018

Admittedly, I was the cause of this issue.  We had long planned on upgrading appliances to stainless steel, and even already purchased a stainless steel dishwasher when ours broke a little while ago.

This seemed like a good plan, until I was looking through my kitchen inspiration pinterest board and came to a realization: there weren’t any fridges in it!  Almost every beautiful photo that I had pinned either had the refrigerator cropped out of it or featured one of those very expensive paneled ones.

Fridges are UGLY, and the location of ours puts it right in the middle of our kitchen and pretty much right in the middle of our whole house.

I knew that a paneled fridge was too expensive, but I got it in my head that a white fridge would look nice and blend in well with the wall of white cabinets we plan to surround it with.

This didn’t please Brad.  He thought it would look weird, and he had already extensively researched appliances in stainless steel and thought the issue was closed.

We opened it back up.

After an adjustment period, he kindly considered all of my proposed options of high-end white appliances (I only wanted ones without the orange-peel texture).  I was hopeful, but we learned a discouraging fact: fancy looking white appliances are overpriced for what they deliver, and have some of the worst energy efficiency ratings out there, making them a non-starter for Brad.

We proceeded to ignore the issue for a couple of weeks until I decided that I didn’t want to hold up the whole project until new appliance lines came out and gave in for stainless steel.

Thus, we delayed for about a month with no reason.

Our Appliance Selections & Deals

Once we got past that detour, we settled on Frigidaire to go with our dishwasher (which is this one) and decided that this was an area of the kitchen renovation that we were willing to spend a little extra for good quality.  Fortunately, Brad was able to shop around for good deals so it wasn’t too bad!

For the stove, I had few requirements except that it not be horribly ugly, so Brad got to pick.  We ended up with this model, with an induction range and convection oven.  We bought it open box and with a dent in the side (which you can’t see when it is installed) from Best Buy for about $600. The only complications were that it came without the user manual and oven light… small price to pay!

It came quickly and without issue (and with removal of our old oven), so here it is now!

It is SUCH an upgrade.

On the fridge I had stronger opinions (as you can tell from our stalemate above).  If we were going stainless steel, I wanted one that was counter depth, french door, and had no water dispenser on the front.  We ended up with this model.

Brad found a dinged unit from Sears for about $1800 all in. (There was a significant discount, but we then had to pay to have it shipped, which brought the price back up to only a small discount off of retail which costs more but often has free local delivery.)

It is coming all the way from Texas so it is still on it’s way!

A Bonus Appliance Update

While we were at it, we also took the opportunity to upgrade our toaster oven.  You can see the old one in the after photo of the stove above.  This intrepid fellow has been with me for 10 years, ever since I bought it for my first apartment for about $20.  And it has been horribly ugly since year 1 when my roommate left a plastic bag on top of it and turned it on.

For my birthday this past weekend, my parents got me this:

Fancy, right?  In addition to looking awesome, it’s a combo toaster oven and air fryer, which I am pumped to try out.

If you haven’t heard of an air fryer, the promise is that it uses circulating hot air to get a crispy “fry” on things with very little oil.  The main complaint I’ve seen is that you need a whole additional appliance for it, so taking this opportunity to upgrade the toaster and add this cool new function seemed like a good plan!  I’ll let you know how I like it!

Next Steps

The appliances were holding up the kitchen renovation because our next project will be to build the wall of new cabinets around the fridge… and as you can imagine that will be a lot easier once the fridge is in place.  It should be arriving within the next few weeks and then progress will resume!