So, last week, the oven broke down. Halfway through cooking the chicken, it seemed to somehow… stop… cooking… the… chicken…. At some point during the not-cooking of the chicken, I walked by the oven and thought to myself: Gee, that doesn’t look right at all. It should be much browner by NOW.
And then we decided not to eat the chicken and got us some pizza instead.
When we bought this place, it came with a home warranty. Since an oven is a necessary item, we called our warranty company and said our oven was, like, BROKEN, or something, so could they please send someone over here to replace fix it.
So, they sent someone from Sears, who arrived mid-Saturday morning. He poked around in the appliance for a while, and then he hooked up a bunch of wires from it to some sort of gizmo he pulled from his satchel, and then pressed lots of cool looking buttons on it for a while. Then he disconnected all the wires, sent a few emails from his archaic-looking laptop and then turned to me and said: Well, the good news is, the oven’s working just fine.
And I was all like: The GOOD NEWS? THAT’S the GOOD NEWS? No, dude. It would have been good news if you told me that the oven was a pile of scrap metal just posing as an appliance and that you’d just emailed two other guys to drive over here with a brand new super-sweet, stainless-steel, state-of-the-art-double oven, complete with steam injection so I could make fabulous homemade artisian breads every day.
The GOOD NEWS would have been that after saying all that, he would have given me a commendation signed by the mayor for actually having successfully cooked dozens of meals in that ancient, not-even-digital thing currently posing as an oven in my little kitchen. Said commendation would have been accompanied with a Very Large Check and an all expenses paid trip to DisneyWorld. Or Williams Sonoma. Or Super Target. Whatever. I’m not picky.
That’s what I would have called GOOD NEWS. But I’m weird like that. And because I’m aware of my essential weirdness, I kept my mouth shut (RegularDad would have been SO PROUD!) and just raised my eyebrows expectantly, ready and waiting for the BAD NEWS. Whatever that could be.
The BAD NEWS, he said, is that you’re not getting enough power into the kitchen. Your electrical system’s got a failure in it somewhere.
So, he called this all in to the warranty company and they sent a fax to their electricians, who don’t work on the weekend, of course. And it was Monday morning when we were finally able to get in touch with them and tell them our situation.
They sent a guy over yesterday, who took a look at our electrical, laughed hysterically and said wait…tell me again…how much did you pay for this place? and then laughed some more when we told him, jumped into his truck and sped off, still laughing like a loon.
Well. Okay. No. That’s not what happened. What happened was that he took a look and saw that the house was still on the old fashioned fuses. The original system that was installed back in 1960. It looked like this:
You know that’s not up to code, don’t you? he said. Yes. We know, we said.
He replaced the blown fuse and technically, the oven was working again. But he also assured us that he’d be back again within a month to replace the same fuse. And every month like clockwork until we upgraded the electrical. He also pointed out to us that because our fusebox was so out-of-date, our dryer hookup was a house-fire waiting to happen, and recommended a clothesline until we upgraded our electrical.
That’s when we became immediately ready to upgrade the electrical. The guy came back the next day and now our electrical looks like this:
And now I’m not afraid to run the dryer. And now I’m back to cooking meals in the Oven That Wouldn’t Die. And now I know where that tax refund is going.
At least it’s done, though. We knew it needed doing. It’s not one of the more glamourous moments in a home renovation, but I still found myself wandering down to the laundry room all afternoon to just look at the new circuit breakers, and marvel at that shiny box and smell that awful leftover odor of that weird cement he used to seal up a line or something.
If I squint at it, I can almost convince myself it’s a stainless steel box. And anything stainless is good.
BUt those 1960’s fuses are SO pretty. I remember those….all the colors…they had such…”heft” I think is the word…”heft” like old, old appliances that won’t die. I had one of those. They don’t make ‘em like they used to is a nice little saying that, at times, can make you feel really superior to have one of those, but not when a Viking Range is calling your name. Then “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” has the word “dammit” at the end.
While I don’t like the new fuse box very well because it has “switches” I think the glue stuff sounds nice. And perhaps that is something you could look into: finding out about that glue..’cause it sounds like you were self medicating and I”d like to know the brand.
Well, at least it’s done. I know I feel that way about my new roof - does it make a difference? I can’t really see anything new about the house - oh, yeah, I need it to keep the rain out. Alright, I’ll fork over all my money for that.
That’s the thing about houses, the really expensive thngs don’t even show. We built our house, so we had to go to the county and pay all the taxes in one giant check. So, the school tax (not the yearly, the one time special assessment for the priveledge of building) is done by the sq. foot, and I’m thinking, “But, that’s enough for flooring, and I’m not even sending my kid to school!”
“I can almost convince myself it’s a stainless steel box”
That’s priceless. When our water heater broke in our other house, we wanted to upgrade the piece of crap one we had anyway but those home warranties will only replace with a “like” model. So we took a “settlement” about half what the junk water heater would have cost. It was worth it though, because we got what we wanted at a lower price.
Just food for thought if something else breaks.
OH, how I long for the days where we spend tons of money on a home! I talk about our dream home with P all the time. The reality is by the time we get to settle down, it will be straight into the nursing home..
Just wanted to chime in with Robinella on the bitter truth that the home warranty will only replace in kind. Our particular warranty didn’t even care to mess with a settlement in order to let us get what we wanted. After the Water Heater Incident at our house I decided that I didn’t care if anything else broke, I wasn’t reporting it to the freakin’ warranty company, which I explained to them in enthusiastic detail when they called to see if we’d like to extend the warranty for another year.