It's (Not) Getting Hot in Here

I think we've probably been in denial about this one for a few weeks (or more). Lately our dishes haven't seemed all that clean when they come out of the dishwasher. They don't have food on them, mostly. They just seem to be foggy. Of course we refilled our Jet-dry, but that didn't help. We cleaned everything out and ran a load of vinegar and baking soda. No luck. We splurged on fancy liquid detergent instead of Target brand powder. Nope. We even tried the power breaker and resets.

In fact, after the excellent suggestions from my mom that maybe it wasn't heating enough, we decided to finally run a load when we were home and awake enough to pay attention (it seems like we usually run it as we are going out for the day or when we are going to sleep).

Cool. Uh oh.

Usually our dishwasher heats up to probably just under boiling.

Searching fixes for this suggests that a repair will run us at least a couple hundred and that it is not, unfortunately, a do-it-yourself type job.

We looked up our dishwasher to learn more about it - turns out, our Bosch is quite a pricy model (or it was). It's been very good to us for 6 years - no complaints until now. And we don't want to downgrade to something cheap, especially if it doesn't do a good job of cleaning dishes, which so many of our friends and family seem to find with their own dishwashers.

Fortunately, our favorite home review website, The Sweet Home, highly recommends another Bosch. The reviews on pretty much every website for it are astoundingly high. With delivery and installation, it would run around $900. We also have the option of "cheaping out" and buying one step down for about $600 and lose what appears to be a magical third shelf at the top (this seems like it would have been amazing when we were still washing bottle nipples and other tiny parts, but still looks pretty cool for silverware, etc.).

Is it irresponsible to think that this might make more sense than throwing money away hoping to fix the old one? This feels like the standard used car dilemma - how much money do you put in before you give up and get a new one (not that we've put money into this dishwasher before, but still)...

And also - black or stainless? The fridge is stainless but the microwave, oven, and current dishwasher are black. We are leaning towards black if we buy at all, since the fridge is separate enough from the rest of the appliances that we feel like it can be an outlier and we don't have to work our way to full-stainless.

D has found one on sale for $800 (including installation) at Best Buy in the time it has taken me to write this post. We might have already made our decision...

Edited to add this nifty flow chart D found, that is helping us slide towards replacing:

Very Alarming

Almost exactly one year ago, we blogged about some fancy smoke detectors that we had installed when one of our three old ones died and we realized how old they all actually were. We spent a lot of time researching the difference between the various sensors, batteries, etc.

Well one thing we have since learned - don't bother getting a 10-year battery because it will start spontaneously going off in under a year.

Our Home Depot alarm that is on our main floor, arguably our most important smoke detector, kept going off uncontrollably and with absolutely no cause. It quieted down when we took it outside. The problem was that with an unremovable battery, there was no way to keep it quiet. After leaving it outside for a few days to "reset" (or so we thought) and then leaving it sitting up high on a shelf for a few days to see how it would react, it managed to stay quiet. We thought we were safe. And so we put it back up where it belonged.

Only to come home two days later to it going off (all day apparently - more on that later). I couldn't get it to stop beeping, even by holding down the reset. I finally tossed it outside until I could calm down my poor scared toddler.

When it finally stopped and D tried to bring it back in, it immediately began its shrill alarm just by him picking it up. He finally had to fully turn it off (which breaks it in the process) and out it went.

I ordered a basic $7 one that requires a 9V battery. It's not fancy but it's definitely better than having nothing installed on our main floor at all. I wonder if we got a dud or all the "10-year" ones die so quickly.

New Year's Resolutions

New year, new home improvement plans - here are some of ours for this year. Do you have any?

1. Major project: remodel the breezeway into an indoor space:

We plan to start talking to contractors and possibly an architect soon. This is beyond the scope of anything we've done to the house before (ugh, we will actually need permits...). Wish us luck and stay tuned.

2. Hire cleaning help. Not so much an "improvement" for the house but for our life. We decided to try to budget for someone who will come in every week or two to clean, and plan to start looking for someone soon.

3. Reach goal: convert to natural gas. More on this to come but it seems that we would have to make some major fixes so that a natural gas water heater could vent out correctly from the basement. We thought converting would be a relatively minor upgrade, but now we think this might have to wait a while longer yet (and possibly be pushed off indefinitely if we should have to unexpectedly replace a major oil- or electric-powered appliance)

4. Replace some doors. This has been on the to-do list since 2013 so obviously it isn't particularly pressing. But I want a new basement door and new hallway doors, if we ever find a good general contractor.

For most of these, our big hurdle is that we don't have very many "go-to" people to call to work on the house. Our lack of time and the increasing complexity of the projects makes us want to turn to professionals. However, our lack of time isn't helping us launch the starting phase that involves doing research and getting quotes. If you're a local reader and have recommendations, let us know!