A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

After seeing our kitchen in a near finished state, Michelle and I decided that we would prefer to buy new appliances sooner, rather than later. We were planning on holding off buying a new refrigerator for at least a year, but once we saw how ours looked in the new kitchen, that plan went out the window. We had the fridge area built with a counter-depth fridge in mind, and we really didn’t like how far our current one stuck out past the counter. Plus we left an opening for a 36″ fridge, so our 28″ one looked a little ridiculous.

So the plan for the weekend quickly switched gears as we found ourselves running around to the many appliance stores in Saskatoon. The plan was to purchase a fridge, a dishwasher, and an over-the-range microwave. We left the stove upgrade until a future date since we want to make the switch to gas. This just didn’t seem like the time for that.

We focused our attention on the fridges, and narrowed our search down to three models. As it turned out, counter-depth fridges are a premium, and are few and far between. They are typically only made by some of the higher-end manufactures so that sucked. I still find it weird that they are more expensive than standard depth fridges even though their capacity is typically five cubic feet smaller.

I was kind of hung up on keeping the three appliances to be the same manufacturer. Michelle was not. We came down to two setups and got the salesman at Coast Wholesale Appliance to price out the two options. Our plan was to pick the cheaper of the two. As it turned out they worked out to be within $30 of each other. No help there.

We decided to leave and sleep on it. As we were leaving we remembered that Saskatoon Appliance had another location in the area so we decided to head over there. We had the saleslady their price out our two options just to see if there would be a difference. I kind of felt bad because the guy at Coast spent a lot of time with us. I figured if the quotes were only a little cheaper at Saskatoon Appliance we would still by from Coast.

Well as it turned out Saskatoon Appliance beat Coast by almost $1000 dollars on both setups. My loyalty to the Coast salesman faded pretty quickly and we ordered our appliances. We really liked a fridge from Fisher & Paykel. I also really liked one of their dishwashers. It is a two drawer system that lets you run two loads separately. Michelle wasn’t as impressed as me, but I managed to convince her. The company doesn’t make microwaves so we went with a Panasonic that seemed to match alright.

If you’re interested, you can read more about what we went with.

• Fisher & Paykel French Door Refrigerator
• Fisher & Paykel Double DishDrawer
• Panasonic Over the Range Microwave

Who would have thought that shopping for appliances could eat away an entire day. We spent nearly 10 hours flying from one end of the city to the other in search of the perfect fit for our kitchen. Now hopefully our new toys arrive soon so we can get our new kitchen completed. I’m also looking forward to the “new” beer fridge we get to put down in the basement.