04/09/2026
Some days you show up to work and everything goes as planned other days you show up for a 4-5 hour appliance job and 8 hours later you’re still not done. Microwave hood went in easy, which is surprising because sometimes those can be a pain. Cooktop was slightly larger than the old one and the cabinets was a little small, got it to fit but took some work. Oven went in pretty easy but is 2” short, customer will be having us renovation the cabinets later this year, we can easily make the rail above it 2” bigger, we’ll go back before and put a piece of trim in until then.
Then we did the dishwasher last. The tile was done after the dishwasher was installed, it was also installed over the original linoleum (big no no). To top that off the dishwasher was probably a tight fit before the tile. There was no way to take it out without removing 3 pieces of tile. Luckily when the customer purchased the house there were extra tiles for the floor. Get the old one out, lower the legs all the way on the new one go to put it in and it’s still 1/4” to tall and it’s a top control so it need a little clearance so that if someone leans on the counter the buttons don’t get pressed. We had to cut the front lip of the cabinet up about 1/2”, the laminate edge was loose so we were able to pull it off cut the wood, we’ll cut the laminate and reapply it when we come back. Once everything was cut the dishwasher slides right in. But the old dishwasher had the handle built in to the front, the new one the handle stick out, so the bottom three drawers to the left open just fine but the top drawer runs into the dishwasher. Talked to the customer about it, he’s fine with having to open the dishwasher to open that drawer for now, hopefully when we renovate the cabinets we can figure out something. We need to go back to figure out the trim on the oven and put the tiles back in, but everything in the kitchen is functional.
These new Whirlpool appliance are a huge upgrade from the 40+ year old appliances that we pulled out. I really like these short microwave hoods, this is the second one I’ve installed. They fit almost perfect match size wise to the old exhaust hood, maybe 1-2 taller. But close enough that you can go from an exhaust hood to a microwave hood without having to modify cabinets. The microwave is short, but it’s plenty tall to reheat leftover. So unless you’re trying to cook a whole chicken in the microwave I think they’re plenty tall for any normal use. Probably going to put one of these in my house if I ever get around to finishing my 3 year long kitchen remodel.