No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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In the category of, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, I have been taking care of the list of “Honey-Dos” left me by my beloved. She, as The Angel of Mercy, gone to help my daughter recover from the birth of my 26^th grandchild, has left me alone to take care of the menial household maintenance and prepare for winter. I was given the assignment of freeing up the rusted grinders in the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. We have lived in our new home for an unbelievable 14 years and the disposal had ceased to function as a disposal should, i.e. , it should grind up waste, and didn’t. I dutifully sprayed the grinders with a rust and environment destroying , but commercially available, chemical and in, but 48 hours, was able to free the grinders such that the waste disposal unit functioned normally.

Unfortunately, in the interim, and in a completely unrelated episode, the dishwasher, which drains into the disposal unit, had its control board burn up in the middle of the night. I awoke to a terrible “ozione-ish” smell that seemed to originate in the kitchen. I sniffed throughout the house and finally came back to the kitchen where the odor was the strongest. Since the dishwasher was no longer functioning, I took the front panel off and found the main control circuit board had burned up during the last dishwasher load. There was a crispy black and burned segment adjacent to one of the relays on the main control board, and the temperature sensor was also irreversibly fried. I searched online for the appropriate parts and found both the board and the sensor available on Ebay and Amazon. I tried to order the least expensive parts but found that the vendors wouldn’t ship to Alaska. As Alaskans are always confused by the unwillingness of shippers to send goods by the US Postal service to Alaska, I was gobsmacked and wrote to the shippers asking that they might make an exception as it would be no more expensive for them to ship to me than for them to ship to an address in, say, Seattle. Both promptly wrote back apologizing, but informing me that their policy was not to ship to Alaska. I finally accepted the Ebay offer of a vendor who would ship to Alaska for only an additional $10 and began waiting for the arrival of the appropriate parts.

In the meantime, after freeing the grinders in the disposal unit, I tried them out by grinding out some carrot tops. I watched from under the sink while the detritus spewed out a crack in the disposal’s side. We have only lived in the house since June 1, 2004 and have accumulated a few undersink items that include 4  packages of Scotchbrite sponges, 4 quarts of Jet-Dry, 10 spray-cans of oven cleaner, 4 quarts of various brands of calcium remover  (Lime-Away and others), 3 pints of granite sealer, ¾ gallon of lamp oil, ¾ gallon of wax remover, 5 packages of household surface wipes, , 3 containers of various Stainless Steel cleaner, 3 quarts of humidifier bacteriostatic treatment, and several other various and sundry items. Needless to say, this was the first time the undersink area had been thoroughly cleaned out. It would be easy to blame my spouse for accumulating the duplicated essential home-maintenance items, but I am equally responsible because I, too, bring home those things I remember we “need” while out shopping.

Anyway, the spewing leak required that I completely clean out the undersink area to find the problem. I quickly localized it to the disposal and found that I could replace the 1/3 horsepower unit with a ½ horsepower unit for only $109 at either Lowes or Home Depot. I remembered that Costco occasionally sold disposal units and, though they don’t have their inventory posted online as do both Lowes and Home Depot, I found in a telephone call, that they had a 1½ Horsepower unit for sale for only $79.99. That was $10 more than the online price, but considering the price of shipping to Alaska, was a bargain.

I trekked into Anchorage this morning to buy the disposal from Costco, returned home and installed it fairly simply in only about 30 minutes. After finding a couple of leaks in the drains requiring me to repair the existing connections with new ones, everything worked.

I am currently waiting for the dishwasher parts I ordered from Amazon and Ebay to arrive when, I trust,  that the kitchen will be back to normal before the return of my beloved. I wonder what might have occurred if I had not followed her instructions to fix the disposal grinders in the first place.

In my mind, I have to conclude that my wife is always inspired.

*800 words, as if you care. See my post of a few days ago entitled, 800 Words.