New Microwave!

Hooray for devices that cause the water molecules in food to vibrate with such vigor so as to heat my food in seconds flat. Hip-hip-hooray for such devices that also take up zero counter space. Yes, I love my new under-the-cabinet microwave.

We spent most of Saturday at Mike and Bernie's house where I finished my latest book, Little Heathens and dead-headed flowers in their garden while Dave worked on their computers. (Bear's computer monitor was on the fritz so Dave disassembled it and re-soldered some stuff until it was working again. Then he installed anti-virus software onto Mike's new computer.) We'd left our dogs at home, in the yard and as the day wore on I was getting nervous that they would be too hot outside like that, despite that I'd left them a big bowl of water. Luckily they were fine, just very thirsty since they apparently didn't touch the outdoor water. I discovered that my darling Ruby had dug herself a shallow hole in the moist dirt under my recently-planted rose bush. The bush looks fine...I just wish she wouldn't dig holes.

Sunday we went to REI to buy a tent and other supplies for my soils class trip. I'm thrilled to report that I still fit into little girls' size pants; I bought two pairs of the pants-to-shorts conversion camping pants from the girls' section for a fraction of the cost of the same style in the women's section. Booya!

Then we headed to Home Depot to figure out what we'd need for the new microwave project. When the contractor remodeled this kitchen to sell the house, he was lazy and didn't bother to connect the vent pipe on the new range hood to the existing (but not aligned) exhaust pipe in the attic. The old stove and the new stove (I think) weren't in the same place so he just sheetrocked over the original pipe penetration. So the range hood ventilation was of the not-so-effective recirculating charcoal variety. For houses that have no way to vent greasy kitchen air, this is the only option and we could have installed a new microwave using the same recirculating vent. But why would we do that when we could have it vent properly, to the outside?

All we had to do was buy some flexible vent pipe, a few connectors, a giant role of metallic duct tape, and a keyhole saw to cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling. We hadn't intended to actually purchase, much less install, the microwave this weekend...but once we realized that it wouldn't be a lot of work we decided to go for it. So we did.

Old range hood and intact ceiling above:
Old (but nice) microwave that we inherited after college graduation from a friend:
We started by removing the old range hood at about 3:30pm and by about 9pm the kitchen we totally cleaned up and back to normal (less the metal pipe coming out of the ceiling which we'll eventually hide behind a sheetrock box). The old hood was hard-wired into an electrical box under the cabinet while the new microwave simply plugs in. So how we have an extra, working electrical connection to which we can install under-the-cabinet lights later on. (Yippee!!!!)

Me in the sweltering attic (donning pants and long sleeves to protect myself from that horrible glass fiber insulation):

A video of me in the attic while Dave is underneath me in the kitchen. You can hear Ruby barking through that piping:


I was going to christen the new microwave by making a bag of popcorn before we settled down to watch Dan in Real Life but we didn't have any bagged popcorn and I was too lazy/hot/sweaty/tired from being up in the so-hot-it-is-almost-like-being-in-Egypt-in-July (but who in their right mind would do that?!) attic messing with the vent pipe rearrangement to bike over to the dollar store to get some. Plus, we have "real" popcorn that we made on the stove. So I ended up testing the microwave by heating up a mug of water...how boring. It worked, though!

"Completed" project with exposed vent pipe: The old microwave is now in the garage and I've gained a few more square feet of beloved counter space.