Monday, March 07, 2005

Microwave

I had a visit from my parents this weekend to help me put in my birthday present--an over-the-range microwave oven. This was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time. My kitchen is small and every spare inch of counter space is valuable real estate, and my old microwave was a very basic (i.e. cheap) one that I originally bought for my freshman dorm room--and that was over 7 1/2 years ago. (It was very durable, however, and still runs great, so with my tendencies toward hoarding, I cleaned it out one last time and put it in my basement--just in case this new model ever breaks down.)

The installation went far easier than anticipated--we were done just before 2:00 in the afternoon after starting at around 11:00 in the morning. We had to take the wiring from the old range hood (which, unbeknownst to me, had an exposed end inches from the back of the metal hood, just waiting to electrocute me) and create a new power outlet box in my cupboard to plug the oven into, but that turned out to be very easy to do (the wire was in good shape; it just hadn't been properly capped). The hard part was finding two wooden blocks of the appropriate thickness to fill out the recess in the cupboard from which we hung the microwave--it took us quite a while to find a piece of scrap the appropriate size. Compounding that was the fact that the templates and directions appeared to have been written by non-English speakers who may or may not have been retarded. But eventually we got it up there and working--it's much bigger than my old one, has a lot of "advanced" features, and my stovetop now has a fan that doesn't make a screeching growl like a cat whose tail has just been run over by a Fiat every time I turn it on. Best of all, it's now on its own circuit, and will no longer cause my TV and Tivo to turn off every time I operate the microwave at the same time as my toaster or can opener. I just don't understand the wiring in my house...the TV and Tivo are in my living room on the north side of my house, while the power strip with my old microwave was plugged into the southmost wall. Oh well--one less thing to worry about from now on.

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