Tag: broken appliances

I try not to have too many things on my husband’s to do list. I have learned over the years that I am pretty capable of fixing certain things in the house. I have also appreciated how handy our kids are, if I can’t get it often one of our boys can so I don’t have to bother him with little things. When my husband has time off it’s nice for it to be actual time off once in a while! I have found the internet extremely helpful learning how to fix the little things, YouTube being great for the visual of how to do various repairs. But sometimes we have to bring in the big guns asking him for help.

My husband isn’t retired but being self-employed he has occasional larger chunks of time off between jobs. During this time, he tries to get everything fixed and working well before he has to go back to work. So, an update on the dishwasher. He checked out the dishwasher and determined that the pump was fine. This is what usually breaks. We cleaned out the filters that were already pretty clean, cleaned out the drain lines, and did everything we could think of. At that point my husband decided it must be the control board. Our power isn’t always the cleanest, and it tends to mess up electronics. He looked up the cost of a new control board and found one for a little over $100. He then priced a new dishwasher and found one at Lowes for a little over $300. Not knowing for sure if the new control board would actually fix the dishwasher, and not wanting to spend more money than we needed to, we opted then to just go ahead and buy the new dishwasher. He was able to get it installed that afternoon and I now have a functioning dishwasher! I am so very grateful.

He was then able to look at my oven. We have had problems with the oven not staying lit. It will light just like it should initially, but if the baking time is more than about 20 to 30 minutes it stops lighting. We have several extra ignitors because that has always been the problem. In the past it has always broken at the most inconvenient time, like Thanksgiving and we didn’t have any way to fix it, so we got smart. We bought 2 extra ignitors the last time we had to fix it. This time however, he determined that the ignitor is working fine, and again, the control panel seems to be what is messing up. At this point we aren’t sure what we’ll do there, we need to price out a new control panel versus a new range. For now, we just have to restart the oven periodically throughout the baking time. I am grateful to know what it’s not, and we’re hopefully closer to what it is. I am also grateful we have a wood cook stove as a backup for our propane range.

I am so grateful lately that I don’t have to go through my life by myself. There is so much I am capable of doing, and so much that I could learn how to do myself, but it’s nice that I don’t have to. I am grateful I have my husband to carry part of the load with me. We each have our own strengths and knowledge and are very capable as individuals, but together I feel like we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, and that we can help each other through about any situation we may find ourselves in. It seems like this world is so focused on being an individual, on self-care, on focusing on what makes you happy and avoiding at all costs anything that might be uncomfortable or hard. We often forget that we don’t grow when times are easy, we don’t grow without opposition. But facing that opposition is so much easier when we have someone who’s got our back, someone we can rely on to carry a little bit of that burden with us. Today, as most days, I am grateful I have my wonderful husband through thick and thin, working together toward a greater good than either of us could accomplish on our own.