Looking at appliances–the grill

The kitchen in the house we are trying to buy is getting dated. We pretty much need to replace everything. We hope to use the pieces in the current kitchen to make a standalone apartment in the daylight basement. The three things we usually do not have to replace when we move are the refrigerator and the clothes washer and dryer, but they all went as part of the sell in the house in North Carolina. We did buy a new clothes washer and dryer when we moved to Texas, so that means we are going to have to figure out how to get a range top and hood, an oven or two, a microwave, a dish washer and a refrigerator.

Of course everything is negotiable, but Lorena knows what she wants, especially when it comes to the range top. The range top shown in the picture on the left is the one she wants. It is the Thermador Professional 36″ with an electrically heated griddle in the middle (for warming tortillas). The range top is always the center piece in her kitchen so we do the best we can. We think we kind of have it figured out this time. In these pictures, it looks like the Albany range top was better and, in some ways, that was true. It had the cool blue knobs (actually, we still have them because we kept the blue knobs that came as add-ons and returned the original metal knobs back to the range top when we moved from Albany to Raleigh) and it was a 36″ inch top with a grill in the middle. That is not entirely true because we had a much better hood in Raleigh than in Albany. All in all it was about a wash.

We chose the grill in the middle of the Albany stove because we thought we would use it a lot. We hardly used it at all. We liked to cook on the outdoor grill a lot more than the one in doors and ended up getting a comal which Lorena set on the grill to warm tortillas. When we moved to Raleigh, we would have had to make wholesale changes to the cabinetry and buy new granite to accommodate a 36″ cook top, so we reconciled ourselves to a 30″ top with four burners and no grill nor griddle in between. Sadly, the blue knobs from our old Thermador did not fit the grill we bought in Raleigh, so they have been packed away ever since. We will bite the bullet and buy new blue ones if they do not fit our new range top this time. We are not sure exactly what we can afford, but we certainly know what we would like!

Notes: We will talk about the hood in a later post