Wake Up

Yesterday our new alarm clock arrived. We've been using a lamp on a kitchen timer for a couple years, and finally sucked it up and bought a Philips Wake Up Light from Costco. 

The kitchen timer worked well but the alarm was hard to adjust. My alarm clock has been broken for awhile anyway, so I was excited for this one. The best part is the alarm time has a +/- feature! So if it's set for 6:15, you hit the minus button to set it for 6.  

The screen brightness was also a huge issue with my last alarm clock and this one has a high-medium-very low setting. So hopefully it won't keep me up. 

It looks a little too fancy for my nightstand though. I may have to do some clutter busting. 

Look what's missing!

Apologies for the double post, this one didn't go up over the weekend!

That's right folks, the old Washer and Dryer got picked up by Habitat Saturday morning. (The Habitat ReStore will come haul away your functional appliances. Also we found out that their Columbia store will start having Sunday hours soon.)

Here is our new stacked unit. We got the biggest one we could. Check out the dryer!

Plus, the lint trap is at the front!

Other bathroom progress is being made. 

Shower pan went in!

More paint samples went up. 

We think we are going with the boring gray on the left. It's such a small space that I'm worried the darker gray paint will be too dark. 

Unfortunately, the washer dryer isn't installed. So I spent Sunday at the place quarters go to die. 

Also, they had two sizes of dryer but the price was the same. I don't really know the difference and was too embarrassed to ask, so I used the giant dryers until my quarters ran out and then took my mostly dry clothes home.

Washer/Dryer Woes

We have to both get rid of the old washer and dryer, and pick out a new stacked unit.  This is frustrating because it turns out that nobody wants to buy a perfectly good washer dryer, and because new stacked units are pricy. 

Our old washer dryer is a matched set, in perfect working condition.  The general craigslist value seems to be about $200 if you cannot offer a warranty or delivery.  We have been unable to get any interest on ours so far, because we refused to discount them that much at this point.  At some point, we may be better off donating them to Habitat's Restore and taking the tax write off (but that will require itemizing and I didn't get receipts for everything else we donated so it would be frustrating to do it now.) 

Our new washer dryer is the GE Unitized 27" with gas dryer.  The 3.4 cubic foot capacity is still twice the capacity of our old washer, so we're pretty excited.

I'm sure some people might wonder why anyone would go with one of these units:

(source)

instead of two of these bad boys stacked on top of each other:


(Source)



 

Ultimately, it came down to two issues - price, and convenience.  In the three weeks we've had a front loading dryer, I have hated taking clothes out of the low dryer.  One of the reviews I read talked about how painful it was to bend down to get clothes out of a front-loading washer.  We decided that a stacked unit is more convenient for a number of reasons - it's much easier to just put the clothes from the top loading washer into the dryer, and it's much nicer to not have to bend down at all to put the clothes in either the washer or dryer.  Also, the front loaders would set us back at least another $500 more than the stacked.   There were generally mixed reviews about the front loaders, saying they don't get clothes clean enough, etc.

With the new unit, it will be just off the kitchen and pretty visible, so I might end up being disappointed that we didn't choose the more aesthetically pleasing unit, but hopefully that's going to turn out to be one of those things I really don't care about.