Making the First Cuts
Measure, calculate, and think
Work on the kitchen has been started. The first irrevocable cuts have been made. Until you make the first cut, you can change your mind, you see. After? well, there’s no mending shattered Formica.
I’d started early, with the delivery of appliances scheduled for Friday, figuring if I could get a good look on Wednesday under and behind the old appliances, I might have a chance of dealing with hidden surprises on Thursday. Planning ahead and leaving time for the unexpected has worked well for me in the past. I’d rather be without the kitchen for a day unnecessarily than frantically trying to remedy things while the installers were twiddling their thumbs (which they won’t, nor will they be helpful, for liability reasons).
At any rate, it was a good thing we did. Getting the stove loose to be lifted up and out of it’s position wasn’t easy, as the dang thing was bolted in place before the countertop was installed, and we could only reach the nut-end of the fasteners, the bolts were out of sight and in a hand-width cabinet in one case. Given the nuts were square, touching the flange the range-top rested on, and hadn’t been loosened in 40 years… you’d think the grease down there would have helped, but no. Also, even if you deep clean your range, it’s not clean. There is a reason I am getting a smooth-top!
With the help of my husband, the use of multiple tools (none exactly right for the job, but I’m not certain this job had a right tool. You have to be ready to improvise) and a blood blister later (pliers bite. Hard.) we were finally able to slide the stove forward and look behind it. We wanted to see what the electrical situation was… and it was weird. Not, we think, dangerous. But as my husband informed me emphatically and repeatedly: “Even forty years ago that was not how it should have been done.”
I would have been six, so I don’t know. However, the next stop was the breaker box, where we learned that not only did the range take up one 50amp breaker, it used two. Wha…? No idea.
Once the stove was safely inert, I called an electrician based in our small town. “Oh sure, you’re near the shop. I’ll stop by tomorrow.” he told me even before I could ask him about a timeline. Bless the man.
With the range on hold until the electrician would be able to safely rewire the house for the new, plug-in stove, I turned my attention to the dishwasher. If the wiring for one was janky, what are the odds the other, installed at the same time, would be as well?
This is where the cut had to be made. When we’d had the plumber in for the leak, he’d informed us that the choices were to cut the counter, or the floor. We’d opted for the counter, and now I cut into it and made the inch of leeway we thought we’d need to get it out.
Spoiler… it wasn’t that easy.
When is anything that easy? Really, I don’t know what I was thinking. Turns out the dishwasher had leveling feet. Which no longer turn, after forty years. Getting them up and over the vinyl of the floor took both of us, a furniture dolly, and a sharp pocketknife. And then… Something was stuck. It was late. I opted to stop wrestling with it, and come back to it in the morning fresh. For one thing, we don’t know where the water cutoff is for the dishwasher. It is not under the sink, at least not for the cold water. For another, I suspect that turning off the power to the dishwasher will also shut off much of the kitchen, which I’d rather not do for too long. We will see what the electrician says.
It’s always a learning process. You can plan, and you can look carefully to learn as much as possible, before you make that cut. But until it’s open and you’re looking inside, there is no way to know. Adapt to what reality is, and improvise as needed to overcome the… weirdness. Life is like that. Not just kitchen renovations.
A prayer for your project: Godspeed.
I've never seen the stove wired in directly like that before outside of a commercial kitchen.