Ding Ding Ding

 It has been one of those weeks...  

After last week's replacement of our exterior air conditioner unit, as the previous one was just flat out too old to be repaired, this week saw two more major appliances heading into the ... well, grey area.

Long about Tuesday night, my wife turned on the oven.  Or that is, she tried to turn the oven on.  She smelled gas, but did not hear the typical "whoosh" that accompanies the oven lighting itself to warm up.  We have had some problems with the burners on the top of the stove also failing to light, though the igniter keeps clicking happily - and uselessly - away - but that is easily corrected with a lighter.  Which we keep handy.  But this was just flat out "oven no whoosh" - and so my wife entered a repair request on our landlord's "repair portal".  And she also texted the handyman fellow who keeps getting tasked with the first-call triage.  

That wee problem was set for solution Friday - that is, today - until my wife took a closer look at her schedule and asked if it could be pushed into next week.  Which was well and good because Wednesday evening, she came upstairs after showering and complained she was not getting much warm water in the shower in our room.  Now, with that shower being all of about 12 feet as the crow flies from the water heater (and perhaps another three feet when you add the vertical rise and whatever the pipes have to do to get from point A to B), that was concerning.  

However, we had some experience with this particular issue.  It had happened before.  So I asked my son to assist with lighting the pilot light again.  He'd done it before.  Because he's younger than me, far more limber than me, and was comfortable looking into a window about four inches off the floor.  Yeah, a window that's about an inch and a half by an inch and a half.  

And what he discovered was that, when you hold the "pilot" button which must be held when lighting the pilot light, the pilot light would light when you hit the sparker button - er, the piezo-electric igniter, I believe it's called - and it would remain lit until he removed his finger from the pilot button.  Hmmmm.  As he carefully read and followed the instructions, it was concerning that the light went out.  The instructions said it should remain lit after you release the "Pilot" button when it's been held down for a full minute.  And he held it for two and a half minutes before releasing - and it went right out.

So again, we called the handyman, and he sent out the fellow who had come last winter to replace the igniter.  And he was in and within ten minutes, the verdict was "dead".  Apparently there's a little glass vial in some water heaters like ours that breaks at some point, and when it does, your water heater is, in technical terms, kaput.  That is, it must be replaced.  

So, yeah.  He made a call, as did my wife, and this morning, after a bit of moving and relocating things to insure a minimum three-foot-wide path from the back door (which was 30 inches wide) to the stairway (which is 40 inches wide), down to our bedroom door (which is 28 inches wide), through our bedroom, into the hallway to the laundry room, through the laundry room door (another 28 incher), and then into the corner of the laundry room where they had a full 17 inches between pipes to insert the new water heater.  

Which they did, successfully, this morning.  And in this process, we also learned our basement floor drain - that is, the hole in the basement floor that's been the drop-off point for excess humidity our air conditioning removes, and the destination of all the water from the leaking water main that came into the building and the pipe that deformed itself after four years - is now "plugged".  That is, it is incapable of accepting the full offloading of a failed hot water heater through a half-inch garden hose.  So there's another little doink to the side of the head.

And yet another reason that yes, I'm glad I don't own this place.  The main refrigerator in the kitchen (we have a mini spare in the garage which we own) has some serious condensation/leaking issues, and the dishwasher is failing to drain completely after every load, but we've been initiated into the secret button sequence which will start the cycle, then jump past all of it to the "oh, just pump it all out" part.  So we got that going for us.  

But again, the bottom line is that we're looking at a new dishwasher, refrigerator, and possibly a stove, as well.  And I probably forgot to mention that, in moving into this place, my wife deplored the utter lack of storage space in the kitchen, which I rather handily resolved by building a quick-and-easy shelving set.  It is comprised by two shelving "towers" of cabinets roughly fourteen inches wide and ten inches deep, each a cabinet stacked on top of another cabinet (and yes, they're made to do that so there are steel "dowels" set into holes in the top of one cabinet's sides, which line up with the holes in the bottom of the upper cabinet's sides, so they are not going to come apart), and those two stacks stand aside a four-foot-wide by twelve-inch-deep unit I built using - get this - shelving and paneling, and a couple of 2x4s.  

That's right.  I bought four twelve-inch wide shelves - they're actually eleven and three-quarter inches wide - and cut two of them in half.  The two longer ones I removed a few inches so they were only about 85 inches long, and they became the sides.  I then connected the sides with lengths of 2x4 that joined the two sides at the very bottom (behind where the trash and recycling cans fit), and below each shelf location.  Each shelf was also mounted on top of a 3/4" by 3/4" by 11 3/4" long mounting strip which firmly supports the shelf.  

And those shelf holds most of our heavy kitchen pots and pans - things like the cast iron dutch oven, and other large pots and smaller ones as well, our wet dog food (we typically buy a 24-can pack about once every 3 weeks or so, so we stay on top of that particular need), and other assorted items.  And all of those shelves will need to relocate if any major appliance shifting needs to happen in the kitchen, because the narrow alleyway that I've left is about 20" wide.  I can get through it if I side-step, because my shoulders do not fit through - but any new appliance will not fit. 

So we got that to look forward to.  And all of this leading up to the big celebration month  - that is, it's my birthday, my daughter's, my late father's birthday, and our wedding anniversary.  All before Halloween, which leads into that major cooking holiday, Thanksgiving, which is of course followed by Christmas.  

So yeah, we'll need a functional kitchen.