washer of dishes

This weekend I decided that I was going to install the dishwasher that we bought, what, like 4 months ago. The major obstacle to installing it sooner was the layout of our kitchen currently. The only place you can put a dishwasher is in the cabinet space under the counter next to the sink. However, this was where the drawers housing our silverware and other utensils also lived and there isn't really anywhere else to put them until we get new/add more cabinets. Thus the dishwasher had been sitting in our kitchen taunting us as we washed dishes by hand. Eventually enough was enough; silverware be damned.

I started by destroying the cabinet to make space for said washing machine:

The old vinyl tile lives on underneath our cabinets!

There are two basic steps to doing things you don't know how to do. Step One is to read the instructions until you have a semi-basic understanding of what is all involved. Step Two is to muddle through.

After I had entered the point of no return by making refugees of our silverware, I headed over to home depot. I was going to need some stuff in order to connect the dishwasher to the sink plumbing as well as the electrical box. Most modern homes that don't have a dishwasher, usually at least have the plumbing built in so that installing one is simple. Old homes, like mine, aren't so convenient.

The hot water line is on the left. It was not added at the same time as the cold water line. That means my house, at one time, had no hot water service.

There were two points of plumbing contention. The hot water line, and the drain. I needed to install a branch for both of these to connect the dishwasher. Getting a branch onto the sink drain was much easier, PVC plumbing is pretty nice to work with. The real shitter was the hot water line. You can see it over on the left in the above photo. The line had a local shut off valve that I had to replace with a valve with two connections. The old valve was soldered to the copper pipe, so I had to use a torch in order to remove it. That was actually kind of fun. The new valve did not have to be soldered, so I was lucky not have have to try messing with that. However, plumbing equipment manufacturers are either evil or stupid. They only sell dual connecting valves with the two connections pointing off on angles you don't want them to point. They put the knob where you want to connect your pipe back up. So if you don't have much pipe to work with you're screwed. Of course, you can fix this by buying some flexible hose, it's just annoying.

After I got all of that connected together, after some trial and error and like 5 trips to Home Depot, it was time to install the electrical. Luckily our kitchen is right above where our breaker box is. I stuffed the cable down through a crack between the baseboards in the back of the emptied out cabinet, this fed the cable into our laundry chute that we don't use. I drilled a hole in the side of it near the basement ceiling and fed the cable over to the breaker box. I connected it up to the same circuit as our pantry is on. I figure one dishwasher and two outlets isn't straining that breaker too much, especially considering the mess that's going on in the former fuse box... After a bit of finagling and only electrocuting myself once the dishwasher was powered.

Now for the moment of truth. Being the genius I am I had never bothered on my many Home Depot trips to think to get dishwasher soap. So off to Walgreens I went. After that we loaded the thing up with dirty dishes and let it loose. It started up and made noise like it was cleaning stuff, and lo and behold when it had stopped making noise the dishes were indeed clean. Another victory for great justice!