Ok so, we haven’t had a diswasher for a while now. Why? Because a few years ago when we got granite countertops installed in the kitchen, we replaced several things, including the sink, the garbage disposal, the stove and the dishwasher. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of buying a GE diswasher. Then again, we also made the mistake of buying a GE microwave when our old one crapped out as well, and have had to replace both. Do yourself a favor and never buy any appliance put out by GE unless you have plenty of money laying around to replace it within a couple of years. Basically what happened with the dishwasher is, the control panel on it decided to stop working. We looked up the replacement part for it online, and the damn thing cost about 2/3 of what a new freakin’ dishwasher would. Screw that!
So in an effort to do something nice for my wife, I start scouring different sites looking for a good deal on a dishwasher. I started with Home Depot, which turned out to be a worthless endeavour. Not only are pretty much all of their cheap dishwashers GE, but their prices aren’t all that great. Then I looked at Sears…still nothing. Finally I figured what the hell and I checked out Lowes, which is where we got our last one. I never realized it, but Lowes has a lot more selection and better prices than Home Depot. At last, my search was over!
I settled on a Frigidaire dishwasher. It has all the cycles we need including sani-wash, it has an eco wash cycle, it fits perfectly in the space, it got great reviews…and…it was cheap! The dishwasher was like $298 or something like that and with tax came to like $315. Can’t beat that with a stick! Anyway, I ordered it online…a few weeks ago.
When I ordered it, it said it’d be in for pickup on or before April 1st. Ok fine. Thing is, I never got a receipt from them in an e-mail, so I had no order number or anything to check on the status. I figured I’d just wait and see if they sent me a notification when it was in. They never did…
Finally, on April 1st I called their customer service at the store where I was supposed to pick it up. Turns out it was there, and they never notified me. So I have no clue how long it was even there waiting to be picked up! This was on a Wednesday. Thursday, after I had called in the previous day to find out where my damn dishwasher was and was told that it was there, they called and told my wife that the dishwasher was there and ready to be picked up. Woohoo!!! Efficiency at its finest! 
Anyway, we’re helping out our friends right now since they don’t have a car, and it’s kind of a pain for me to keep the car during the day since I’d have to take both my friend and my wife to work and then pick them up at the end of the day. So after checking and finding out that Lowes opened at 6am, I decided, after about two hours of sleep, to go in before my wife had to go to work and pick it up so it was done and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. So I go in and tell their customer service person who I am and what I’m there to pick up. She was actually pretty helpful for 6am, but ended up passing me off to another guy who looked up the order and then went to bring out my new treasure. It took a while, but finally he arrived with it at the front and we were ready to go…almost.
See, I never got a receipt when I made the order, and I’ll be damned if I was leaving there without one. So I told the guy and asked him for a receipt. Turns out, there were complications with that. See, whoever orders the office supplies at Lowes has obviously been slacking off, because some dude in a button up shirt was out of toner. How does this affect me? Well, since he was out of toner, he had come out to the customer service desk to print out thirty pages of something or other. So first I had to wait for that to finish, then as it turns out, he used up the rest of their toner too with his print job! They printed my receipt, and it came out damn near blank! Fortunately, one of the customer service ladies had the wherewithall to pull the toner cartridge out and shake the crap out of it, which got it functional enough to print me a faded, yet readable copy of my pick-up receipt. After the guy helped me load it in the car, I was on my way home.
The Install…
So I get home and I take it in the house. My wife is still sleeping, so I wake her ass up and tell her what an awesome husband I am for going to pick up her new dishwasher at 6 o’clock in the a.m.. She couldn’t believe I went there that early to get it, which was a much blander response than I wanted, but oh well. Anyway, now the fun begins.
I wanted to get the damn thing installed and done so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s the kind of a guy I am. I hate having things hanging over my head. I just want to get them done and overwith so I can move on to doing stuff I actually WANT to be doing.
First thing I did, naturally was to go out in the garage and turn off the power at the breaker. No point in getting electrocuted first thing in the morning, right? The second thing I did was to attempt to pull the old one out. Unfortunately, this proved to be a huge bitch, as it was wedged in there and the feet were extended just a bit for some stupid reason. Actually I know why they were. They came that way, and I never screwed them down when I installed it because I didn’t think about it at the time. So now the feet were catching on the linoleum and basically causing me a massive headache as they tore up the linoleum even more than I had when I removed the original diswasher to install that GE piece of crap. I tried to juke it up with a crowbar, but it just wasn’t happening. Finally I had to take a pair of pliers and turn the damn foot screw like 1/8th of a turn at a time until the foot was fully retracted and I could finally slide it out of there.
So I pull the dishwasher out, and the first thing I see is mouse crap all over the top of it. See, we had the misfortune of having not one, but two mouse infestations last year. It took a while to trap them all, but we finally did. Unfortunately, they got into freakin everywhere, including back behind the cupboards and behind the dishwasher. Needless to say, when I finished pulling out the dishwasher, there was mouse crap on the floor too. Tons of it.
Now utterly disgusted, I flip the diswasher down on its face and start disconnecting things. First I disconnected the power wires. Cool. Then I disconnected the drain hose. Cool again. Then I disconnected the water feed, at which point I realized that I had just done one of the stupidest things ever… Yes that’s right. I forgot to turn off the damn water!
As soon as that hose disconnected it started spraying all over the place at maximum pressure. So I grab the damn thing tight and press my thumb over the end. The pressure made it damn near impossible to hold, but I did manage to stem the flow temporarily. Now I’m screaming for my wife to come turn the damn water off. She comes running out in the kitchen and asks me where the faucets are. I tell her they’re under the sink towards the back. She gets under there, and as every second passes, my thumb is getting weaker and less able to hold the pressure. It starts leaking out, and I’m screaming at my wife to hurry up because I’m loosing it. She keeps saying she can’t find it, and I’m all stressed and yelling at her, which wasn’t helping. See, part of the problem was that we have a ton of stuff under the sink. Pots and mugs and food dehydrators and tupperware bowls and all kinds of stuff. This made it impossible to get back to the damn faucets, but at the time I was so stressed I didn’t even realize it. Finally I told her to hold it while I got under there and did it.
Now, at this point after the fact I realize I could have just screwed the damn thing back on to the old dishwasher to stem the flow, which makes me feel like an even bigger moron. Still, in the stress of the moment it didn’t even occur to me to try that, so I handed her the hose and told her to hold her thumb over the end. She did, but she’s not as strong as I am, and I could barely hold it. So I give it to her and it’s spraying all over because she can’t hold it, and I’m down under the sink at this point hucking all the crap under there out behind me like a madman trying to get to the faucets. That’s when the next problem begins.
See, the line that runs to the diswasher is HOT water, and I mean really hot. Because she wasn’t able to stem the flow, enough water had finally cycled through it that it was now spewing steaming hot water, which basically made it so she was unable to stop it at all because she couldn’t touch the water without getting burned. By now the kitchen is getting quite flooded, I’m soaked, she’s soaked, there’s wet mouse crap everywhere and I’m still digging through crap under the sink trying to get to the damn faucets.
Finally, success! I found a faucet!!! I grab it and quickly start to turn it off. Nothing. So I go over to the other side, and after fighting to get the base of the food dehydrator and some stupid tupperware bowl out from in front of it, I found the other faucet. I quickly turned it off as well. Again…nothing. Water is still spraying. So at this point I have a giant WTF??? floating over my head with little swear word squiggles around it. Then I spot the problem. There’s ANOTHER faucet attached to the hot water line that runs to the sink. I had turned off the one leading up to the sink, but the one leading out to the dishwasher was below it in line, so it was still feeding. Quickly I grabbed it and shut it off, and the crisis was over…to a point.
Now I had another problem to deal with. A flooded kitchen full of wet mouse crap. Wonderful. Fortunately we have this really awesome Bissell steam cleaner, so I was able to use it to suck up about 98% of the water, and a lot of the mouse crap with it. About two and a half tanks later, I had finally cleaned up most of the water, and I ended up using like a roll and a half of paper towels to clean up the rest of it along with what was left of the mouse crap. I don’t even know how I avoided getting some funky ass disease from all that, but I consider myself lucky.
Ok, now the cleanup is done, so I stand the old GE piece of crap up and get it out of the way. Now it’s time to open up my brand spanking new dishwasher. Oh boy! I needed some success after all that! I was just hoping there was nothing wrong with it, because at that point, if their had been, I’d have probably gone on a killing spree of epic porportions! Jeez, what a nightmare!
So I unbox this thing, and to my sheer delight, it was perfect. So I drag it into the kitchen and lay it down on its face and start hooking stuff up. First I went to hook up the drain hose. Now, this particular drain hose is a ribbed plastic hose. Why use a ribbed hose? I have no clue, but it had a big, hard rubber end on it that you could cut down for various sized fittings. Well, we have a hose running out from under the sink that attaches to the garbage disposal where the drain line connects to, and this hose wasn’t designed to connect to that hose. So I tried to remove the big, hard plastc end, and only managed to split what small amount of smooth plastic there was at the end of the hose a bit. The big piece wasn’t removeable, so I had to cut it off completely, which didn’t leave me with much smooth end left to work with. Fortunately, it turned out to be just enough, and I managed to fit the end of the extension hose over it and get the clamp on it. It wasn’t until I actually did this step though, and needed a little extra slack, that I realized that the hose wasn’t attached to the dishwasher. I could have unwrapped it from over the top and actually extended it all the way under the sink to the damn garbage disposal! I thought the damn thing was attached on there where it wrapped around! Well crap! Still, it works the way it is, but damn it I could have had a nice, clean connection straight to the disposal. Oh well…
So now I go to hook up the power. On the old one, there was a white wire, a black wire, and a ground wire coming out from the dishwasher, which was easy enough because the wire coming from behind the wall has a white, black and ground as well. I just wire nutted the appropriate wires together, taped it all up with electrical tape and bing bang boom, I was done. Well this new dishwasher had a black wire and a white wire, but no ground wire. The instructions said I was supposed to screw the ground wire to the chassis. Well, with the stifness of that wire, the short length of it and the fact that I didn’t have any end connectors, there was no way for me to do that. What I finally ended up doing, which is something I’m not proud of by the way, was that I wedged the ground wire between two pieces of metal on the wire box cover so that it was held firmly. I felt like a retard doing that, but at least it works.
Ok cool, got the power hooked up, got the drain hooked up, and now it’s time to hook up the water line. So I did. Done and done…at least I thought I was.
With everything hooked up, I go to flip up the dishwasher so I can put it in the hole under the counter where it goes. I flip it up and it whacks on the counter at an angle. Why? Because the god damned water feed line doesn’t have enough slack on it to allow me to pull the dishwasher out far enough to stand the damn thing upright!!! Well CRAP!!!!!!
So I lay it down on its face again and disconnect the water line. Finally I’m able to stand it up. So I push it about half way in and I’m finally able to hook the water line up from underneath. Unfortunately, there’s no room hardly to move the wrench, so I had to finger tighten it as much as I could and then turn it the rest of the way like 1/20th of a turn at a time until it was tight. Sheesh!!!
Finally after that was done I was able to push it in the rest of the way and secure it with the mounting screws. Finally, I had our new dishwasher installed! So I go turn on the power, run a cycle and check for leaks. All is well, and I’m both relieved and exhausted. Now my wife has her new dishwasher, and my self-induced nightmare is over. Tell you one thing. If I ever change that diswasher again, you can be sure I’ll remember to turn off the damn water first! Unfortunately, I’ll probably forget to turn off the power and end up killing myself, but oh well. I guess being dead is better than having to install a new dishwasher.
(Current Mood: tired
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