Shopping from the Sofa

I did something new for me yesterday: I bought a stove while sitting on my sofa. My old stove worked, in the sense that it got hot and cooked food, but it had been perhaps a wee bit overzealous about that. The oven was heating up nearly 50 degrees hotter than the dial indicated, and the “burner on” indicator light for the stove would come on randomly, first if you shut the oven door or otherwise bumped the stove fairly hard, later if you set something on the stove. Yesterday, after I cooked breakfast, the light wouldn’t go off when I turned off the burner, and it stayed on even when the burner was cold. Worse, it was making a weird whining sound that unnerved me so much that I flipped the breaker (unplugging would have required pulling it all the way out). Since the stove is original to the house and more than 30 years old, I figured that it wouldn’t be worth it to try to get it repaired, and it looks old and worn enough that it would have been a factor in selling the house, so I figured I might as well get a new one. I was grumbling about spending the time to go shopping while I researched stoves on the Home Depot site, when it occurred to me that all that happens when I go to the store is that the store associate goes online and orders it (usually after I’ve spent about half an hour trying to find someone to help me). There’s no real difference in ordering it myself online. I had it narrowed down to two stoves that were basically the current version of what I have now and had decided to go with the slightly more expensive one that had the better customer reviews (93 percent said they’d recommend it, vs. 85 percent of the other one), and the more expensive one was above the threshold for free delivery, which made it ultimately less expensive. But when I clicked to put it in my cart, the price came up at $100 less than was marked. It was an online only unadvertised special. I ended up getting the more expensive one with the cord kit for installation, delivery, haul-away, and tax for less than the base price of the “cheaper” version. And it was a deal I couldn’t have had if I’d gone to the store.

It’s going to be delivered Friday. I can survive that long without the stove because I have an electric teakettle for boiling water, I’m having dinner at church tonight anyway, and I made a vat of nacho soup on Monday, so I have leftovers to nuke. Between the electric kettle, the toaster oven, and the microwave, I’m good to go, though I will confess to getting a few baking urges, just because I know I can’t bake. I imagine I’ll be making either muffins or scones for Saturday breakfast, just to play with my new toy.

Now I will have replaced all my kitchen appliances, and they’ll all be white instead of the ugly bisque color that came with the house.

It is possible that I have some kind of plain, white issue going on. My walls are plain white (except for one wall of wallpaper in the dining room). My sheets are plain white, as are my towels. My dishes are plain white. And now my appliances are, as well.

I’ll have to be efficient the rest of the week to fit in the writing plus the tidying I’ll need to do to be able to clear a path for the delivery. Some furniture may have to be shifted, and I’ll have to rearrange some things in the kitchen to make it easier for them to work. Plus, I’m the kind of person who cleans like I’m having a party whenever anyone, even a repairman, is coming over, and my house currently looks like I’ve been frantically writing a book.