Journal

We’ve had a Kenmore oven with a glass electric cooktop since we moved in our house 18 years ago. We’re pretty sure it’s a very early flat electric cooktop. There was a manual in the pantry for it when we moved in that looked like it was from the late 70s.

This stove/oven has been terrible the whole time. It’s incredibly hard to clean because it was from an era before they knew to design things without nooks and crannies where grease would lodge. I have spent hours scraping tiny crevices and degreasing this stove that I resented. The burners take forever to heat and then get really hot suddenly. It’s very easy to burn things. And the oven heated unevenly so one side of the oven is always a little crispier than the other.

We hate this appliance more than any other. And it’s the very last one we have to replace. Water heater, air conditioner, boiler, dishwasher, refrigerator, microwave – all of them were newer than this ancient oven, and all of them died first.

Finally, finally, the oven stopped heating. Stephanie could hardly contain her delight. She tried to act dismayed, but I could tell there was a bit of joy in how quickly she gave up on troubleshooting. I was a little more diligent in trying to figure out if there was a repair that can be fixed by a tube of Sugru by tesa. Not much more diligent, but I did try several times. She already had plans to go shopping.

The stove we have purchased: GCRI3058AD – Frigidaire Gallery 30″ Freestanding Induction Range with Air Fry.

It is a convention range with air fryer capabilities and an induction electric cooktop. One that will hopefully be easier to clean that the old one.

This new range is free-standing, where our old one was a drop-in. Which was weird, because it sat directly next to the refrigerator, meaning that there was a three-inch strip of countertop on the left side of the stove between it and the fridge. They had to have a bit of counter and a side panel to enclose the stove. Not enough counter to actually *do* anything with, but…

So this weekend I demoed out the section of counter between the fridge and the stove and the part that wrapped around the back. For something that appeared to be a flimsy and insubstantial piece of cabinetry, it was surprisingly hard to get out. But I did it, finally, and we just finished painting the wall behind the two appliances, which has needed to be done for years. Once we had them both away from the wall, there were three different colors of paint behind the stove.

I’m so excited to finally have that wall painted that I sat down and wrote a blog post about it.