This weekend I did something that proudly puts our household firmly into the middle of the 80′s: I installed a microwave.  This is one of those awesome contraptions/appliances that heats up food in a matter of minutes and allows us to defrost meat if we’ve had one of those boneheaded days where we forgot in the morning to get out food for the evening that we froze last January.  In essence we’re in shape now to save money on eating out because we blew the frozen meat schedule.  I cannot tell you how many times we’ve been low on pantry items, low on other non-pantry items and then had the meat not be defrosted.  It took me until this month to figure out that a microwave, which is not as expensive as a dishwasher, could save us money in the eating out department.

This isn’t revolutionary by any stretch, but we’ve been living without a microwave for 3.5 years now and so having one kinda feel cool and funny.  Various things get hot quickly in the microwave instead of dirtying up several pots and pans, which means I may not have to run the dishwasher as often, or wash as many dishes as often.  Its funny to think how much we’ve been spending on some things because of the fact we didn’t have a microwave.

I actually ended up having to do the following, in case too much information is something you like to have:

• Remove old ventilation unit over the stove
• Remove old cabinet above old ventilation unit over the stove
• Do some electrical magic to make sure the microwave plugged in just right and didn’t cause electrical fires
• Fabricate a spacer/mount for the microwave so as to make sure that it stayed securely in place.  This was not in the directions, but I am overly concerned about things staying on my wall.
• Mount the microwave with help of the wife
• Partially unmount the microwave with help of the wife and fix the direction of the ventilation fan as per the step skipped in the directions I apparently didn’t read carefully enough
• Re-mount the microwave
• Re-mount the cabinet above the microwave and spacer/mount.  This changes our cabinet configuration, but in a good way.

For those of you keeping track I got to do electrical work, wood work, cabinetry (a slight exageration), and install a money saving device.  The only major casualty was my thumb when a random hammer flew out of nowhere and struck it.  I feel like the lovechild of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor and Suze Orman**.

** not really, that’s disgusting.  I’m really glad I have the parents I have.