It’s strange walking through a grocery store thinking oh wait no not that no oven, oh wait not that…
I froze a half a pan’s worth of leftover berry crisp before going out of town a few weeks ago and it is silly and funny how important that crisp feels now: we will have it tomorrow morning for a special treat. I make crisp all the time, only, I can’t. So yeah. Treat. It’s like we’re hardwired to want right now what we have to wait for even if we wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.
I called a number of companies yesterday, trying to find one, anyone, that had a Bosch double oven in stock, preferably an 800 series. The 27″ size I needed would have been nice but I gave up hope of that pretty quickly–30″ is the standard. The woman at a Sears store checked her computer to see if any of the other Sears in the entire San Francisco Bay area might have a floor model in either size, since they sell them. I got nowhere.
But I did get the curious bit of information from her that if I ordered online the company would charge me a hundred dollars less than if I went to the store to do so. And I thought, are they *trying* to kill off their physical stores? Wow. At that I wanted to go in to order from her personally in thanks for her considerable time she spent on the phone with me but I really did want to see what I was buying first.
After all, we went oven shopping a couple of years ago just to see what our options were if we were to get rid of the too-random-temp one with the broken lower oven. (The unit that just blew up.) There was one brand where the back of the handle on the door had sharp exposed upper and lower metal edges the length of it that you could easily cut your fingers on, and I did: the handle looked pretty in front but the manufacturer had skimped so that the metal wrapped around but didn’t actually meet much less get seamed at the back. I cannot begin to imagine how they thought that was okay. Maybe they assumed people would order online and then simply be stuck with it?
Bosch is a good brand. But I still wanted to see one first. Trust but verify.
I finally tried searching for ‘major appliances, (specifically) my town,’ and that brought up Davies Appliances in Redwood City.
I was intrigued. I’d forgotten about them. My contractor took me to their store when we were remodeling over twenty years ago–good to see the little guys still succeeding out there.
The thing you saw first walking in their door was a Bosch 800 series 30″ double oven. And it was beautiful.
They offered us a good price, they offered us a contractor whom they said knew their stuff on the installation–that this was all they did, and they would make it look like it was the oven the kitchen had been remodeled with in terms of fitting into the existing cut-out. Shipping was free. We wanted an extended warranty? Three years or five? Five? Sure.
Sears had offered none. That had been the deal breaker. Our then top-of-the-line Thermador double oven blew through an $800+labor motherboard in three years and the second one a few years after that and you bet I wanted to spend a few hundred not to have that problem again any time soon.
The amazing thing? None of this three-week-wait stuff. It will be picked up from the distributor Monday and they will call before they come. Which might not be Monday–but it might.