Missives from the 6th Floor

Got a call from the builder (Scott) this afternoon telling me that the lights we had selected for the bathrooms wouldn't work due to the placement of the electrical boxes - so after work we went back to home depot to try and find suitable replacements. While we were there we looked at grout colors (we're going Black Cherry), carpet (something in tones of blue/gray/white) and appliances. Didn't end up finding lights we really liked, other than two possibilities from the special order catalog - so we'll go with the (slightly cheesy looking) default and I'll upgrade them later when it's not in the critical path.

I don't want to go off on a rant here, but houses in Seattle tend to have electric kitchens - which annoys the hell out of me. I hate cooking on electric - and I don't see how you can label an electric kitchen as "gourmet." Fortunately our house is propane, but finding gas ranges at appliance stores is difficult, cause they're just not in demand. Best Buy had two, home depot had a few more, but still a limited selection. Did as much comparison as you can on-line, but there's nothing like actually seeing the thing up close and personal.

The kitchen is golden oak cabinets, black/blue/green granite counters, and a mix of light and dark tile - and we decided to spend the extra money on the appliances and go stainless steel.

The dishwasher was easy. Whirlpool has a unique feature - the silverware basket doesn't consume space in the racks, which I really like. When we remodeled the kitchen in the Sprig house, that's what we bought - so we're doing the same, only in stainless.

We decided to go with an Advantium over-the-range-microwave/convection/halogen-thingy. Kathye loves hers, and aside from an unintuitive user interface Dawnise and I liked it.

The range is turning out to be tricky. Frigidaire has a model that looks promising - 5 burners and grates across the entire cooking surface, nice aesthetics, but I can't get a picture that shows the control knobs.

You might not think knobs would be a big deal, but they are. When we remodeled the Sprig kitchen, I had just read Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. He has a discussion of how poorly designed stoves are, from a usability perspective. The two things I play close attention to are knob placement and the position of high and low relative to off on the burner controls.

Most stoves (with the notable exception of some Jenn-Air models) put the control knobs in a line across either the front or the back - so there's no inherent mapping between burners and knobs. Does the left-most knob control the left front, or left rear burner? Without reading the label (or turning it on) you can't tell. The burners are arranged in a polygon, why not arrange the knobs similarly? There are a few stoves that do this right, but they tend to be really expensive.

The second question is - as you turn the knob from off to full on, does the burner output increase, or is high immediately adjacent to off, and low at full rotation? The second case is preferable - because when you're shooting for low power, you don't want to have to worry about the flame going out 'cause you turned it a little too far. I discovered that the low end GE stoves do it wrong, but the "Profile" line (much more expensive, naturally) do it right.

We get an appliance allowance from the builder - but as is so often typical, he's building a nice house, and trying to save money on what he puts in it. So we're going to essentially match his budget to get the kitchen appliances we want.

We left our washer and dryer in CA since they were, without exaggeration, older than us (we bought them used) so that got added to the shopping list.

At some point in the next week or so, we need to get back over to the house and meet the carpet supplier to decide how much we put into upgrading the carpet and/or pad.

So for the moment, we wait - wait to see how the remaining construction goes, and hope we manage to close on or before January 31st, as scheduled. Fingers crossed.