A Look at our New Kitchen Appliances
We are officially declaring 2024 the "Year of the Appliances." It was only 6 days after we purchased our new washer and dryer that our wall oven bit the dust in the kitchen. We had a service guy come out hoping we could fix it to buy a little more time but it was deemed "unfixable." Even though there isn't much about this kitchen that I like or is my style, I'd been holding out on doing much in here to potentially do a larger renovation in the kitchen, including new appliances, all at once.
We'd been nursing our refrigerator for a while because of that too. Already had the front ice/water unit fixed once after we moved in, and over the last year or so the seal had gone bad - we often walk in to find the fridge door open. Sometimes overnight.
The problem is, I really didn't want to have to replace just one appliance at a time. I am way too OCD to have mismatched appliances, but there was no way I was going to buy new black appliances to match the current set knowing i'd like to lighten everything up in here eventually.
After a few weeks of rocking our countertop multifunction air fryer as our only "baking" appliance, and coming to terms with the fact that having two appliances needing replaced I should probalby just replace everything, we decided to go for it. Luckily Memorial Day was approaching so we figured it was a good time to take advantage of the holiday appliance sale.
Selecting and Installing the Kitchen Appliances
We shopped around for a while both online and in stores to decide what we wanted to do. We landed at Nebraska Furniture Mart to get some help making final decisions and landed on these specs:
Stainless Steel Kitchen Appliances
I'd be open to white appliances with the right cabinets, especially that fancy and cute Cafe brand, but with what we have today and for general flexibility in any design decisions to come, we decided on stainless steel.
KitchenAid Brand Appliances
The KitchenAid line came highly reviewed and recommended in all our research. I'm more of a "make it happen" mom than I am a "homemade" mom, I figured if we're buying a full kitchen, we'd want it to last and be of quality. The professional and clean look on top of their reliability sealed the deal. We were also trying to match the size of our existing Whirlpool appliances due to the built-ins and they are sister companies so sizing is comparable.
Counter-depth Refridgerator
The biggest thing that hung me up was deciding on the fridge. I LOVE the clean built-in look of a counterdepth fridge but wasn't sure how much we would miss all the storage we'd lose compared to the current standard depth. (Nearly 4 basketballs!) I also loved the idea of the french door fridge with wide shelves for big cakes and platters, but ultimately decided on going counter depth and keeping the side by side. This allowed us to gain more height for more veritcal storage, and it fit nearly perfect in the space.
Initial Review on the New Kitchen Appliances
The crews from Nebraska Furniture Mart installed our new fridge, wall oven, microwave and dishwasher.
They hauled everything away except our refridgerator - we kept that so that we could recycle it through MidAmerican Energy's Appliance Recycling Program. Figured rather than paying NFM $39 to take it away, we could get $50 from the energy efficiency program!
We're loving the new fridge - but especially the new ice maker! It makes little round ice cubes that everyone loves. And bonus, George hasn't figured out how to help himself to water from the new fridge with the set-back dispensers.
The new wall oven has an air fry feature, so we ditched the countertop appliance and broght back the OG toaster. The kids seem most happy about this outcome! Who knew!? They never could figure out how to toast in the other one.
We've only tried to air fry a couple times. Haven't gotten quite the same results as the countertop ones but will keep trying.
Even though all of the other appliaces have the steel bar handle, we opted to lose the handle on the dishwasher and do a more flush front. The counter above is our high-traffic food buffet line so we were afraid of people bumping into it all the time. And according to the NFM sales guy, he suggested the guys would especially appreciate this decision. ;)
This also has a top third rack for utensils which we're loving for lids, water bottle parts and large utensils.
We're very happy with the clean lines and professional polished look these give our kitchen. Compared to the black appliances we had before, the switch to stainless is a good start to lightening this space up.
And even though I wanted to wait to do a bigger design renovation, these appliances may just have been the catalyst I needed to start thinking about making some bigger changes in here. We'll see...
Need a kitchen appliance fix? Here's what we got:
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