Jay, Jon, and Jerry-rigging--Installment 2

To continue from where we left off in the recap of this very long week…

Thursday was a good news/bad news kind of day. Bad news: need to tear up the kitchen so dw guy can get to the motor on the dishwasher. Good news: Kitchen is easy to tear up, LOL. Bad news... oh, it's just too funny to tell in bullets, so I'm switching to paragraphs. Go get your coffee... ;-)

See, when we bought this house, the guy who sold it to us left us very explicit instructions about the eventuality of the dishwasher needing servicing. "Don't let anyone tell you the counter needs to be cut up to get to the dishwasher for servicing it," he said. "You can pull it straight out. All you have to do is 1) Unscrew that piece of floor moulding. 2) Pull back the linoleum--it's the flexible kind. 3) Pull up the piece of plywood directly in front of the dishwasher--it's only held in by one screw right in the middle." Sounds easy enough, right? I should be able to do this while the kids take their afternoon naps, right??

One flat-head screwdriver, 2 Phillips-head screwdrivers, a hammer, a box-cutter, a chisel, a putty knife, and almost two hours later... the dishwasher was fully accessible. No, really! It went something like this:

Move the microwave stand so you can move the stove (with a boiling pot of soup on it) so you can get more room to work in front of the dishwasher. (Besides, the second screw in the moulding was just behind the edge of the stove, so the stove had to move anyway.)

Pry off said moulding.
Start pulling up the linoleum.
Realize there's not enough space open to pull back the flooring far enough to clear that plywood that had to come out.
Move the stove further over.
Pull up the flooring the rest of the way.
See one screw head, kinda filled with spackling.
Get the box cutter out to clean out the Phillips-head screw head.
Get the screw head clean enough for the screwdriver to get a grip.
Plywood pops up a bit in that corner when the screw comes out... so far so good.

Spend next 20 minutes or so breaking up the spackling that had been driven into the cracks around that piece of plywood. The spackling on the plywood was a nice idea--smoother foundation for the flooring--but it pretty effectively sealed up things that I needed NOT sealed.

Chisel and putty knife came in handy--got all the borders of the plywood free of spackling but the board still wasn't interested in coming out. Hmmm... How was I supposed to get out a 1/2" thick sheet of plywood so tightly wedged in that a putty knife wouldn't fit between it and the sub-flooring next to it (much less anything sturdy enough to lever up the board with)?!? The one spot where I could get a hold on the board was under the face of the cabinet with only about 1" clearance--not enough to really get a good hold, LOL.

Spent another 30 minutes or so messing around with the claw-hammer, flat-head screwdriver, and the chisel trying to pry up the board. FINALLY got enough leverage in the right spots to slip the chisel under one side of the board. Alternating between the putty knife & the chisel, worked down one side of that board til almost one whole side was raised, but *still* couldn't get it to come out. Seemed like the board might have been glued down. He *did* say ONE screw, right?? Got to wondering (since that one screw head had spackling in it), what if there are more screws I can't see?? ..... ...... .....

There wasn't one screw in that piece of plywood, there were FOUR!!! And the last 3 had been so thoroughly spackled over that I didn't know they were there for the first 50 minutes I was working on it. *Smiles rather sarcastically*

Got out the last 3 screws 15 minutes before the dw guy was to show up. Yeah--there was a point to this exercise, and it wasn't supposed to be just to tear up the kitchen, LOL. Had a good laugh with DH and the dw guy about the lengths it took to get access to the dishwasher, then wandered off to let the dw guy work in peace.

An hour and a half later the dishwasher was up and running again. Jay says "so does it sound any quieter to you?" Me (thinking it still sounds like a freight train but not wanting to insult him since he'd been working for almost 2 hours & hadn't been planning to charge any labor): "Um... are you... kidding?" Jay:"Well, sort of. I had to put the old motor back in it." Apparently Whirlpool did some major reconfiguration of the innards of our dishwasher... and the slightly used motor would NOT go in our dishwasher--no way, no how. There wasn't even any way to co-mingle parts from both motors to make a new one--he tried. Nothing, NOTHING was interchangeable. Bless his heart, all that work...

So we're almost back to square one. At least the dishwasher is running again, albeit loudly as ever. And I now know there are 4 screws, not just one, LOL.

So yeah........ it's been a week. And it's not over yet. The slugs are still at it... but that's another post for another day--or at least after a couple hours of sleep! ;-)


Word of the day: Jerry-rigging. I've always loved that phrase. :-) Are you allowed to call one hyphenated word a phrase?? Anyway, having grown up in rental properties built by that man named Jack while riding in cars held together with baling wire (think duck tape on steroids), I learned early how to jerry-rig things. (It was the sections on gears and mechanics that garnered my high score on the ASVAB in high school, not that girly secretarial stuff, LOL.) Watching the ending of Foley's War on PBS Sunday night got me thinking about the entomology of the term Jerry-rigging, since the Brits called the Germans "Jerrys" during WWII, and wondering if there was any correlation. Did the term jerry-rig come about because the Germans (Jerrys) rigged up booby-traps?? Good old Wiki to the rescue... I love the Internet. I want my big computer back.