Renting comes with blessings and curses. In one hand, you don’t need to worry about major appliances breaking, like air conditioners, stove / ovens, or the water heater. The flip side is that no matter how bad they are, as long as they work, which is a very subjective term, you have to make do with what you have.
Before we bought this place, both myself and Amos were renting. My stove, some old thing where the brand had long been scrubbed off, was temperamental. One hot plate was directly connected to the depths of hell and all the heat that brought with it, yet my grill would take 15 minutes to make grilled cheese at an acceptable level of melty-ness. You do not stand between me and my grilled cheese. But I was the lucky one. Amos had a bench top oven / stove combination that had one working hot plate and an oven with a more variable heat distribution than the Wallabies’ scrum form. So when we moved in and saw our “brand new” stove, right from the 60’s, we knew what we were getting into.
It was somewhere between the two. The grill was fine (yay!) but the oven door didn’t close properly and leaked heat, and the hot plates were either all or nothing. We’d had plenty of training with this situation however, and managed to make do.
Until it stopped working altogether.
Our new Westinghouse 547 Stove
The new stove cometh
When in the middle of renovations, the last thing we wanted to have to do was replace a major appliance. Sure, you can get a cheap stove for $300-$400 dollars, but they are horrible devices. For people who enjoy cooking (and I count making grilled cheese as cooking), a good stove is a must. While I would love a great kitchen integrated into the cabinetry, in our kitchen it just isn’t possible, not without completely redoing the kitchen layout. So a new all-in-one oven / stove it was. We settled on a Westinghouse 547 for a tad under a grand, and it has been a revelation.
It’s the simple things. An oven that heats up quickly and evenly, a glass top that means none of those exposed coil elements where everything gets stuck to it, a great grill that results in fantastic melty cheesy-ness. It may seem like a simple thing, but when trying to make a home, basic amenities are not a privilege, but a requirement. Just the simple ability to say “I’m going to cook, and will be able to do so easily” makes life so much more pleasurable.
Just like grilled cheese.
A musician, and IT professional, master of the flat pack assembly and now a home renovator. A man of many skills, you could call him a renaissance man. But not in like the whole Renaissance fair type deal. Those things are just weird.
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