Working on the weekend

I don't know if everybody's doing it, but I certainly was. We had a busy time this weekend. I bagged up a lot of weeds and thatch from the back yard, mowed quite a bit more of it, and pulled some weeds in the front and back. There are just so many out there, it's tough to feel like you're even making a dent. Here's what I did, in a series of pictures:

Yes, that's me in my purple dress shirt and slacks, cutting my lawn. Boo-yah.

Yay, cut grass! This is where we stand right now in the back yard. I've pulled weeds and cut the grass in some areas, but it's a slow process. I'm trying to cut as much grass as I can to allow sun and water to get down to the ground so hopefully this stuff will all come back to life. It looks all the way dead here, but it is slowly coming back to life as I cut and water it. Once it's all weeded and cut, we'll be hitting it with some turf builder and some patch compound in the bare areas. We have some big plans for this yard, many of which are inspired by my older sister's yard (where we spent the day yesterday helping them unload and lay down 4 tons of rock).

We also got some new appliances this weekend! The washer and dryer were delivered on Saturday morning. They're Kenmores and we're very pleased with them so far. They hold so much more than our old top-load washer did. They're also much quieter and a lot more water and energy efficient.

They're very pretty, but they need to be in a nice finished laundry room. That's on the list, but it's a ways down still. There are still a lot of things to finish upstairs before we get to worry about the basement.

We also got another appliance on Saturday, but we went and got this one ourselves. It's a Bosch dishwasher. We went with Bosch because they have a good reputation, specifically for their noise level. We tend to pre-wash all of our dishes before they go in the dishwasher anyway, so Bosch's lack of a hard food disposer doesn't bother us a bit. The only complaints I was able to find on the reviews were centered around the Bosch not drying dishes very well. This is another thing we're used to dealing with. Bosch, as a rule, doesn't put heating elements in their dishwashers. People who are used to heat drying their dishes will be disappointed with Bosch, but people who air dry (like we have always done) won't notice a difference. Air drying takes less energy, and you also don't have a scalding hot heating element in the bottom of the dishwasher, which is very good for any plastic items you may put in your bottom rack.

We had dinner plans with some friends on Saturday, so I wanted to get the dishwasher to the house and installed as quickly as possible. That meant I got to do the transporting and installation myself. I don't really mind that, as I like to do things myself. Maybe you'd noticed.

Unfortunately, because of the time crunch, I didn't get to take as many pictures as I would've liked. I have quite a few pictures of the earlier parts of the process, but not many of any later parts. I'll show you what I do have at least.

Here she is. She's very pretty.

This is where the magic happens. The brass ring on the left is where the hot water supply line goes in, and the metal panel on the right is where the power cord gets attached. Keep in mind, if you're going to be installing a dishwasher yourself, that the hot water supply line and the power cord are generally sold separately. The power cord is sort of weird. Apparently dishwashers don't come with power cords. Weird, right? I think it's sort of like other appliances (ranges and dryers specifically) where they aren't sure what kind of connection you'll have. As near as I can tell, dishwashers used to be hardwired into the house. They didn't plug into a receptacle, the wire just came right out of the wall. Kinda weird. This means that you'll need to wire the plug in yourself. Our dishwasher came with the drain tube at least, so we didn't need to get that. I think that most would come with that, since the drain outlet isn't a standard size or anything. So, without further ado, here's what little of the process I managed to photograph.

This is the water supply line. It comes with brass 90º connectors that attach to the two most common types of dishwasher supply hose inlets. We used the smaller one, with a hefty bit of teflon tape on both ends. I've started using the tape on all of my joints, just to keep everything nice and tight and leak-free.

Tighten these down by hand, and maybe a little extra on the hose itself. The instructions are pretty clear on not over-tightening. I got the 8-foot hose for this one, per the suggestion of the lady at Lowe's. This inlet is on the front of the machine and you don't want to come up short with it. I ended up with some extra hose, but that's better than the alternative. I just coiled it up a bit under the sink and it's fine now.

This is the drain hose that came with the dishwasher. It's plenty long enough to get to the drain pipe, especially once the dishwasher is pushed all the way in. I was a bit worried about it at first, since our drain pipe is on the far side of the sink from the dishwasher, but it worked out just fine.

There are a few different configurations for the drain pipe, as near as I can tell. We have an open drain pipe where you can hook this copper pipe so the water will drain down, or you can hook the drain tube directly to the plumbing via the garbage disposal or another connector. When we get a new garbage disposal, I may move this over to it and cap off the other drain pipe. We'll just have to see what makes sense at that point. For this setup, push the hose onto the long end of the pipe and use a hoseclamp to tighten it down.

This one came with the dishwasher, but you can buy them separately if you want.

There we are. Just hooked up and over there. It really just seems a little loosey-goosey to me. I put a nylon zip-tie on there just to hold it together a bit better, but I'm still not very excited about this style of connection.

Now for the power cord.

You want to make sure you get one long enough (8 feet is generally going to be fine unless you have a really long way to go) and to get one that's grounded. Three wires is what you're looking for, here.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much else going here for pictures. I'll have to kind of rough-in the rest with a few before shots and some text.

This is the electrical connection plate. The hole down on the bottom is where the wire comes through. There's a weird little connector thingy that clamps down on the wire to keep it from moving around. Here it is:

And the business end of it:

I don't know the technical term for this piece, but it's in the electrical aisle of your hardware store, near the conduit and everything. It's a tension-reducer so pulling on the cord of your dishwasher won't cause your cord to pull out of the connectors. Here's how it looks in practice:

The screws clamp down on the cord pretty tightly, and it really doesn't move at all after that. The connector itself has a screw-on bit that comes off so you can put the threaded bit through the hole and then screw it on again to hold it in place. It's pretty simple and super cheap.

Ready for power! Unfortunately, this is the last picture I took. The rest is pretty straightforward, though. I changed the valve under the sink for a new 1/4-turn valve and that was a big pain. The compression fitting on there had bonded the brass ring to the copper pipe so I couldn't get it off. I ended up just using the old one again. Not ideal, but you do what you have to do.

Once that was done, I hooked the supply line up to the valve, hooked the drain pipe up to the back of the dishwasher (with another hose clamp), and hooked the power cord up to the front (make sure you don't plug the cord in until after you're all done messing with the bare wires). That was even pretty easy, to be honest. You strip the wires a little, stick them up under the metal screw plates and tighten them down. After that I ran a test cycle to make sure nothing was leaking and it all looked good. Woo-hoo!

So now we have almost every appliance we could want. The fridge is working great, we're borrowing a small microwave from my sister, the oven is still going strong, and now we can wash all the things we make dirty by living in our house. The next few projects are going to be more lawn stuff I think, and I want to get up on the tall ladder and finish cutting in on the front room. Once we do that, the tall ladder can go home with my parents and we can start touching up paint and texture and all throughout the house. Thanks for reading, as always.