Kitchen Update....Again :)

Yep, you read that right. We decided that it was just time to get a new stove and fridge. They were hand-me-downs from John's parents when we moved into our house which were very appreciated, but it was just time to move on. I've never had use of one of the big burners. A boiled over pot shorted it out when we were living at the in-laws, and recently the other big burner would randomly not work when you would turn it on. The last straw with it was when I was cooking dinner a few nights ago and every time I moved the pan on the burner it would shoot sparks from where the element plugs in. We were worried about having a fire. It was just time.
We decided to get a new refridgerator also. It worked fine, but the bottom shelf was broken. We've had it wired for a while now, but the wire fell off, and the back peg that holds up the shelf also broke off. We tried super gluing it on but it didn't hold. I was getting tired of balancing everything so the heavy stuff was on the right side and the shelf wouldn't tip and knock everything over. The drawers didn't stay on their tracks, and it also had water and ice in the door. We don't have hook-ups for that, so it was just wasted space for us.
We looked online at appliances to get an idea of what we wanted and how much they would run us in the finance department. Then we called John's parents and asked them to go with us to get them (they have a truck and trailer) so we weren't having to pay for shipping or somehow trying to tie them to the top of the minivan. LOL We always appreciate their help!
We headed to Grand Junction, and after looking at Home Depot and not really finding anything, we went to Sears. They didn't have anything that we wanted in the color/style either. I was getting pretty discouraged. Everything was either the wrong color, Not a big enough burner, too big a burner, not being able to turn off the the big burner, not able to can on it, too much "stuff", not the right style, side by side (which I don't care for), had water in the door, too big, too small, etc. It was not going well. They had two stoves to choose from in white, one of which didn't have a big enough burner to can on so that was not even worth considering, and they other one was more than we had talked about spending and had every bell and whistle you could think of and then some! :) In the end we went with it. I had to get out my owners manual to figure out how to set the bake time so I made sure I did it right since we were leaving dinner to cook while we were at church! It's got the pre-heat separate from the bake, flex clean (not sure how it's different from self-cleaning), Recipe recall, slow cook, warm and hold, Air Gaurd (Which is suppose to make your house not smell if you are cooking something stinky like fish), and it has a button which turns the oven into a convection oven. I've got a lot more reading ahead of me. I like that it is a flat top, and that it's not the standard black. It is flecked which will hide more dirt. I also really like that the coil inside the oven is hidden. It will make it easier to clean out! Once I figure out how to run everything I think I will really like it. It works great by they way. Notice the yummy french bread I cooked in it??
We had pretty much written off getting a refridgerator because I wanted one with the freezer on the bottom and the fridge on top, and no one had any of them in stock in white unless they were smaller than what we currently had. I was not going smaller, so again, not an option. As we were trying to decide what to do with the stove, the salesman asked if we would come and look at a floor model fridge. It was bigger than what we were looking for (I think it is 25 cu ft, and ours was 21), but after measuring many times, and checking the measurments we had brought for our opening, we decided it would be a tight fit, but we'd make it work. John was pretty nervous that it wasn't going to work and then what would we do? By all measurements it should work just fine--have a little faith. :) John's dad told him he would shave the cabinets down if he needed to. :) John's solution if it didn't fit was to take out my shelves in the pantry and put it behind the door. LOL In the end, we had to take out the molding on the floor and sides of the cabinets, and trim the corners off of the face molding, and it tightly sqeezed in. :) Yea!! It fit. I was laughing because when we first moved into our home (4 1/2 years ago) and had the new linoleum put in we had to remove all the molding around the base of the cupboards. Our friend has a nail gun and put it all back in for us. We had already pushed the stove and fridge into their spaces when he did that so the pieces that go down the sides of the appliances never got nailed back into place. When I painted the kitchen and the stove and fridge were pulled out, I had him come back and nail them into place. We had to remove the ones by the fridge to make it fit! LOL How ironic.

See the tight fit? Couldn't have come any closer than that!

So, now we have a new stove and fridge that match the dishwasher, microwave, deepfreeze and range hood. It looks so good with the new paint job! :)

We saw this table at Sam's Club a week ago when we went and watched Eclipse, and fell in love with it. Not only was it a counter height table (Which we've been saying we want for a couple years now), but it had 8 (EIGHT!!) chairs. Our whole family could sit around the table together! We were beginning to wonder how it was going to work when Eli no longer needed the high chair (Which we hate, and can't wait to get rid of!). We have outgrown the free table we inherited from a friend when we got married. It was a glass tabletop which you could never get clean without washing both sides of the table from sticky little fingers, and the top didn't hook to the base, so if one of the kids leaned on the table, it would flip it up. We were afraid one of the kids was going to get hurt if it ever got tipped far enough to slide off the base! We taped the dimensions of the new table out on the floor, to see what it would be like (it has the leaves that store inside it and takes it from a rectangle to a square.) The table at Sam's was a great deal for that many chairs. We are thrilled with our purchase! Isn't it pretty?

It was an expensive weekend, but it was time, and I love how everything turned out!