Update (11/24/10, 4:45 PM): Thanksgiving has been saved!
The electrician came, and the house is rewired for a double oven. The appliance store tech came but couldn’t fix the oven. And he wasn’t going to do anything about it until Friday. No way, we said, and it turned out an almost identical double oven was available. It’s installed, it works, Thanksgiving dinner is back on! The temporary oven is a lesser model than the one we bought, so it will be replaced in a week or two, but meanwhile we can cook.
In other disaster recovery news, the plumber came too, and all is right with the world. Gregory and family should be here any minute.
At the risk of repeating myself, happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
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Original post (11/24/10, 10:08 AM):
I owe you, my readers, an update this Thanksgiving Eve.
Donna and I are remodeling our kitchen piecemeal, one small project at a time. We’re starting with a built-in double oven, which we bought late last week.
It was to be installed yesterday, but first we had to hire a carpenter to enlarge the cabinet opening, which meant Polly and I had to pull out the old oven and disconnect the wiring to it. The new oven, and the guys who were to install it, didn’t get here until after six last night. They hooked up the wiring, installed it in the cabinet, and flipped the oven circuit breaker on the side of the house back on — and nothing.
Out came the oven, wires were disconnected and reconnected — and nothing. The installation guys told us we’d probably fried the circuit breaker when we disconnected the old oven. I didn’t buy it, but what could I do? It was now eight at night, so we had them reinstall the oven in the cabinet, and called around until we found an electrician willing to come by this morning. The day before Thanksgiving.
He was just here. Nothing wrong with the circuit breaker, and after he and I pulled the new oven out of the cabinet, he tested the wiring and found that there is in fact power to the oven. So it’s a bum oven.
But that, of course, is not all. The circuit breaker and wiring are not adequate for a double oven, which one would think the appliance store or the installation guys might have mentioned. Oh, the oven would work, were it not itself bad, but it wouldn’t work right if we were to run both at once, which is rather the point of having a double oven in the first place.
So the electrician, who squeezed us in this morning on an emergency basis before a scheduled job elsewhere, is squeezing us in again at the end of his day, coming back to install more robust wiring and a circuit breaker with a higher amp rating. That’ll be a pretty big job, requiring him to get up into the rafters between the ceiling and the roof, snaking new wiring down the length of the house. In addition, the appliance store is sending out a tech to fix the oven. If it’s unfixable it’ll have to be carted back to the store and a replacement found.
Unless the electrician gets the new wiring in before the appliance store tech fixes the oven (assuming he doesn’t have to cart it away), we won’t be able to cook Thanksgiving dinner at home tomorrow. If it were just us . . . Donna, Polly, and me . . . we’d go to a restaurant. But our son Gregory is driving down from Las Vegas today with our daughter in law and two grandchildren, and four single friends are coming to dinner as well. Time to punt!
We called Mary Anne, one of the single friends who’s coming to dinner, and she said don’t sweat it, we can cook and eat at her house, bless her heart. So we have a backup plan, thank goodness. That takes care of the turkey and side dishes, but I still need to prepare two ducks on a charcoal smoker, a messy, four- to six-hour process. I can do it on our own back patio tomorrow morning, then drive the ducks over to Mary Anne’s in time for dinner (fortunately she lives only a few miles from here).
I’ve been freaking out over all this, but only because it seemed Donna was taking it better. I wouldn’t allow myself the luxury of freaking out if Donna were freaking out too. But of course it turns out Donna’s at least as upset as I am . . . she just hides it better. She’s blaming herself for starting this project just before Thanksgiving, but hey, I was on board with it too. I need to give her lots of hugs today. I tried to cheer her up by telling her we’ll have a Worst Thanksgiving story to laugh about when we’re old . . . and she said wait a minute, we’re already old, we don’t need any more stories!
Nor is this the end to our Thanksgiving story . . . for the past two days I’ve been hearing a hissing, as of water running through a pipe, whenever I walk past the water heater in our utility room. Last night when I went out with a flashlight to reset the circuit breaker to the oven, I realized I was standing in water and mud. Water heaters, I’m now told, have safety valves, usually mounted on the sides of houses, to vent off hot water when there’s too much pressure, and our valve is acting up. So a plumber’s coming too this Thanksgiving Eve, squeezing us in like the electrician is doing.
Things may not be all sweetness & light at Chateau Woodford, but they are mostly. Even though, these last couple of days, I have to remind myself to count my blessings, once I actually start counting there are many. Our new flooring is in, and beautiful, Polly has weeded the back yard and it’s never looked better, the house is clean and ready for company, and our son and his family are on the road as I write, inbound for the holiday. And I have a blog where I can vent off a little pressure of my own.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!