Over the past few days I have learned how to trade up from a very good dishwasher to a awesome dishwasher to a totally awesome dishwasher. There are amazingly few steps from very good to totally awesome, except those to the bank to get an awesome amount of money to pay for the totally awesome dishwasher.

The trick to the trade up relies on serial mistakes. When building a house this is not hard to do so replacing your very nice dishwasher with a totally awesome one is not technically hard. It can be pretty embarrassing though.

My kitchen is composed to two legs that are at right angles and a huge island. The size and exact location of each has been a moving target for a host of reasons. The kitchen is large but the linear feet on the wall where the window, and traditionally the sink goes, by which the dishwasher usually sits, is somewhat constrained. The kitchen wall is not cramped but it is attached to utility room. The utility room has, well, utilities and those take up a lot of room.

The utility room houses the massively impressive run-of-the-mill HE washer and dryer which are about the size of a small car these days. Our washer and dryer are platinum in color which is a gray/silverish color with a brown undertone. They have big windows and doors that open and close. If I parked a Smart Car in my utility room unless I turned on the new high intensity LED overhead light I might end up putting laundry soap under the hood and clothes in the door. If you don’t want a smart car in your laundry room just add a steering wheel to one of the new HE Washers and a radio antenna with an orange ball to your dryer. You now have a Smart Car and a VW Bug in your utility room. They can get the clothes clean too. Both really have awful traction in snow so you have to leave them indoors during the winter.

But I digress. The utility room was a balancing act with the kitchen. How little room in the utility room still has room for your HE Washer and Dryer as well as a laundry tub to hand wash stained items or carrots fresh from the garden? This is why the length of the counters in the kitchen on the sink side have been moving targets. I had planned an 18″ pantry beside the french door refrigerator that replaced the french door refrigerator that burned in the wildfire that ate our old house. Between the fridge and the sink is a small space that is occupied by drawers and a counter top. Next is the sink and dishwasher. Turn the corner and there is filler to hold the dishwasher in place and provide enough room to open the drawers and doors of the first cabinet that is at a right angle to the dishwasher. In a kitchen, an inch here and a half inch there is game-changing. We got several of those game-changers in the kitchen.

We installed the very nice dishwasher into its very own designed space. When you opened the door to the dishwasher the new microwave drawer needs to suck in its bowed out tummy about 1/8th of an inch for the dishwasher to clear the microwave. When I went back and sussed out the correct measurements for the dishwasher rather than taking what was on the spec sheet they were off by as much as an inch an a half. The front handle stuck out just over 2 inches, not 3/4 as reported on the spec sheet. The dishwasher specs were off and so too the microwave. The specs were accurate to the edge of the frame and to the edge of the handle. What they did not show was that the front of the microwave bows outwards from the edge of the frame making a nice bow neatly tucked within the measurement of the handle so it was impossible to tell how the shape of the fit into the room. I thought to remove the microwave but the drawer microwave is cool. It is a microwave and warming drawer. It was in the scratch and dent sale with a full warranty and too cool to pass up and I did not want to let it go out of the kitchen for the want of 1/8th of an inch.

When I found out the dishwasher did not fit I embarked on a search that brought up all of the Bosch dishwashers. Bosch dishwashers are the smallest full-size dishwashers I could find. That is, until 2013. Like HE washers and dryers the newer models of Bosch dishwashers were bigger. Bosch underwent a total rehab of its dishwashers in 2013 and like about anything that uses water and power theses days they expanded. It is like the early migration from Windows to Windows 3. Make it a little bigger, make it bloat-ware, and it must be better. The only full size dishwasher that was smaller did not have a “hard food grinder” having instead a “four stage filter system” meaning chunks of left over food could make it from our dishwasher to the septic system.

Cast the net wider. Make the prices go up and see what you get. You get prettier machines that costs more. Cast the net wider yet and not only do you get more thoughtful machines with more variety they get a whole lot more cash. Strike the “thoughtful” dishwasher. That even sounds expensive. Go to scratch and dent sale, hope for a good size, and start wrangling to get the bet price.

When we surmount the microwave tummy curve clash, even if we installed all of the cabinets on the wall tightly and squeezed the dishwasher in place three drawers won’t open. I want opening drawers. Besides, the corner also looks like a log jam.

I tried to figure out how to make my currently owned very good dishwasher fit so we don’t have to lug it to the store who will refund our money.

I failed. This is how I found myself falling in love with measurements.  It hardly mattered what dishwasher brand or model, if it was smaller than the last and still a “24 inch” dishwasher. I took all the search limits off and found a 24 inch dishwasher that is actually 21 7/8 which will fit nicely. It also allows us to put cabinet doors on to match our other cabinets. Matching is good since it reduces the visual junkineess of that corner of the kitchen.

After much discussion we decided to replace our brand new, very good dishwasher with the awesome model even though it was so far out of the budget that we could not consider it a trade-off from one brand from to another. Twice as expensive than a very good dishwasher is a lot. A real lot of money.

Very good has to go. Totally awesome cannot come, it just costs too much even in the re-manufactured ones. Order the awesome dishwasher and don’t think about the totally awesome one you found before you found the awesome one. Order that awesome one Saturday and then wish you had gotten the totally awesome one. Today I got a do over. The one i ordered had a ding in the door that did not show on their scratch and dent website. The company called and said, “we just wanted to make sure you knew it was there, we can ship this or we can return your money and you can get the more expensive one you were originally looking at…..no, there is no additional discount, you are already getting  discount on it.” But wait, I am not getting any discount on the dishwasher I wanted to buy. “It is a pretty awesome price as it is, you should be glad to get it at that low price.”

I ordered the more expensive one. It was $200 more than the awesome one that I spent three days regretting I had bought. I got the opportunity to go to totally awesome. It costs only a little more than twice as much as the first dishwasher. Money is rare but awesome is pretty up there. Totally awesome is very rare these days.