I recently installed a new dishwasher and here’s what I learned that will hopefully save you more than $150.

 

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Here’s What I Learned

  1. Pay someone else to do it
  2. Don’t start at the end of the day
  3. Minimize the chaos and noise
  4. Get moral support from a friend
  5. An empty house makes it easier to think
  6. Eat good food and get all the tools ready before help arrives
  7. Don’t give into the pressure of other people’s needs if you aren’t capable
  8. Don’t base your time estimates on a pro if you aren’t a pro (see #1)
  9. Take a break and come back to it later instead of continuing to grind away on the problem
  10. Read the install manual several times, then start on the first page and forget about the other pages
  11. Good lighting and reading glasses make a difference

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Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

Today I’m sharing 11 things I learned from installing a new dishwasher.

Number 1, unless there’s something to learn that looks like fun or takes less than 30 minutes, pay someone else to do it. When all is said and done, I probably spent between 3 and 4 hours on this project. Not counting all the other, uh, mental drama and other things going on in my head as it pertains to this.

If I take a step back and think of what my, like, hourly rate is, uh, it far exceeds the $150 that I would have had to have spent to have had this thing installed. And if I had paid the $150, it would have been installed a week ago instead of being 85% installed and still in need of some more work. And, you know, some of this is hindsight is 20/20 because I had some friends that did it themselves and they said it wasn’t that hard. And yet there were some complications in my case because of some extenuating circumstances. So number one lesson here, it’s probably worth paying the installation fee.

2, Don’t start at the end of the day when that decision bank is empty. So I picked up the dishwasher on a Monday night and brought it home and promptly started trying to install it. Now, this was before— I think this was after soccer practice, before I had had dinner. Anyway, there were just any number of different things that were not in my favor. Open the instruction booklet, start reading through, realizing that I need some additional parts that I don’t have, and essentially very quickly becoming overwhelmed with all the different things that needed to be done that I had no idea how to do.

And I consider myself kind of handy enough to be dangerous, kind of in the same way I call myself technical enough to be dangerous. I can build a Linux server and configure some services, but if you want me to write any substantial code or anything like that. Not my thing. Same thing here with little handy stuff like this. You know, I can repair simple things and use normal tools and that kind of stuff, but which is all that’s essentially involved with installing a dishwasher.

But what do you do when the floor isn’t level or, you know, there’s been previous water damage and any number of things? So lesson number 2 here was starting at the end of the day was not a great idea.

Number 3, if you’re a semi-introvert, or there’s also, I think a new term is just called omnivert. So on the Myers-Briggs, all of my scores are kind of right down the middle. And so I’m Introverted, just slightly on the introverted side of the scale, but not way off to the extreme. So not an extrovert, but I can kind of play on both sides. Something interesting I just listened to on the TED Radio Hour was an episode on silence or quiet.

Well, it’s called Quiet. It’s about introverts and how when they do mental computations, they need a lower degree of noise than extroverts. And this was definitely confirmed for the number 3 learning here, which was that there were some other things going on in our house at the same time, including my son. And I find it very hard to think when there’s a lot of stuff going on. So, uh, You add number 1 and number 2 together here and we get to number 3.

Yeah, no music, like turn the music off. For me, my best thinking is usually when it’s really quiet. So anyway, third takeaway here is minimize the chaos, distractions, interruptions, noise, et cetera. Unless you’re an extrovert and I guess you like that stuff. Number 4.

Get moral support from a friend. I wish I’d done that sooner. I have a friend that’s pretty handy with stuff like this and lives nearby, and I think has maybe even installed these before. Anyway, I tried to figure this thing all out with me and my wife for a while, and then this, you know, starting on Monday night, we— I think we tried for about an hour or so. And there were just more questions than answers.

Do we need the top mounting brackets or should we mount it on the side? The little— I don’t know what you call it. They’re not mounting brackets, but they basically hold the dishwasher in place. And then there was the electrical and where should this box go and why isn’t the cord the same? Or why isn’t the electrical wired up the same way that the old one was?

Any number of things. So having another friend come and give me some kind of moral support and just kind of a second brain to walk things through, that’s not a close family member, I think there’s something to that. In fact, I have some friends of mine that raised their own chickens to eat, and I helped with some of that. Process, the slaughtering process a few years ago. And the husband was joking to me that I was saving their marriage by being there.

So I think that there can be a lot to be gained from getting the help from a friend that’s not your spouse. They provide objectivity, maybe sometimes some humor that you wouldn’t be able to hear from your spouse. And it just changes the dynamic. Number 5, Closely tied into number 3, ideally in a completely empty house. I had a situation this weekend where the rest of my family was gone overnight.

Just in conjunction with this, I was able to coordinate my friend coming over. And that was really, really useful because the house was completely quiet. There was no chance of any interruptions, and the two of us could just kind of think and troubleshoot and talk out loud and just, just do what we needed to do. Which tied into number 6, which was eat good food, listen to good music, etc. So before getting home on Friday night to meet my friend to do this, I stopped and picked up— no, it was— I’m sorry.

Well, not that it matters to anyone. It was Thursday night, not Friday night. So I picked up a pizza and I picked up this pizza. I— it was from Papa Murphy’s. I don’t know if you have that where you live.

So I baked this pizza. I ate a whole bunch of it. I got the workspace ready. I got all my tools ready. I started on some of the electrical and I just had this really peaceful time to think, get things set up.

And then my friend arrived. And when he arrived, I had already eaten good food. Maybe not good from a health standpoint, but I think sometimes for projects like this, a little comfort food isn’t a bad thing. So eat good food, listen to some good music, drink whatever you like to drink.

Number 7, don’t give in to the pressure of other people’s needs, demands, or expectations. This one’s a little delicate.

Items number 1 through 6 here, there was a lot going on for me this week. Some other side things that I was working on that were also weighing on my mind, some other decisions that needed to be made. And I was also trying to just mentally brute force my way through this dishwasher at night, at the end of a long day, thinking that there was really no option but that I had to do this thing. Some of it was unspoken expectations that I thought were there that this had to be done. Some of them were a little more explicit.

But in situations like this, it can be really easy to just kind of set aside your own shortcomings and think that you need to rise to the occasion. And many times we do need to rise to the occasion. But kind of in hindsight, when I look at this, This dishwasher was not life or death. It was a convenience. And yes, it meant that we had to wash dishes by hand for another 3 or 4 days.

The world did not stop spinning. Our kitchen was kind of a mess. But by waiting a few days, having a little time for things to kind of settle out, getting my friend’s help, this thing went a lot better. So recapping number 7, just be really clear on why you are doing what you are doing when you are doing it. And if you have enough gas in the tank to get the job done.

And you know what? Sometimes we just don’t. And even if that’s going to be upsetting to someone else, we need to state our limitations, own them, and then commit to what we’re going to do instead. Number 8, pay someone to do it. I guess that’s kind of a repeat of number 1.

This was kind of a subsequent revelation to me, which was I watched someone else install a dishwasher in our house before, about 10 years ago. Guy came in and had it done in probably about 45 minutes. He had to install some new electrical, and I don’t know that there were any other Big complications, but he had this thing done in 45 minutes. But that’s what this guy does all the time. He’s probably installed hundreds of dishwashers.

I had installed zero. One thing I think that’s important, or the actual learning for this one, is don’t take a time estimate from a pro and think that it can be yours. In this case, all told, when this thing is all done, I will probably have spent 4 hours installing this dishwasher. Someone out there probably listening thinks, oh my gosh, that’s way, way too long, John. What’s your problem?

I don’t know. That’s just how long it took. So given the situation I had to deal with, if I had paid the $150 for someone to come out to my house and do this, they probably would have been done in 45 minutes or an hour and would have gone on their way. But instead, I took the cheap route and, well, I guess I’ve had some learnings from it. Number 9, come back at the end of the day or a couple days later.

So there’s something about taking a break from something that really can help let things settle. Sometimes it’s tempting though, when you’re in the heat of a situation to grind away at it, thinking if I just keep grinding away on this, I can figure it out. But sometimes instructions like this install manual are not so clear.

Number 10, speaking of instructions, read them several times, then start on page 1 and don’t worry about any of the other pages. That was another good learning here was I completely overwhelmed myself with all the different dimensions of things I needed. I needed to fix, I needed to redo the electrical. I needed a plumbing part that had come with this Ridiculously priced installation kit. This installation kit came with a hose and 2 different connectors and maybe something else, and I only needed one of the connectors, which was a fraction of the price at Home Depot.

But reading the directions, it was easy to just kind of get totally overwhelmed with all these different aspects and all these different decisions that I needed to make that I didn’t really know how to make. But I would have been much better served to have Skimmed the whole install guide and then just started on page 1 and just said, okay, I’m gonna do one Pomodoro, you know, one, one 25-minute work block and see how far I can get on page 1. Once we get done with that, we’ll see where we’re at. If we’re totally stuck and getting nowhere and it’s obvious that there’s no gas in the tank, stop. But at least, at least then at that point you get credit for having tried.

And little number 11, good lighting. I have an old ancient shop light. It’s like one of those, um, things you used to— it has a little metal cage on it that used to hang to work on cars. And, uh, one thing that I don’t know how I came about doing this, but I ended up using that light. I don’t know if I had— I think I had a headlamp as well, but good lighting made all the difference in the world in this.

Sync space. I was just able to see things so much better, except when I wasn’t, which was realizing— for any of those listening that are getting on later in life, or maybe you’re in your 40s and your eyesight is changing dramatically like mine— maybe you’ve got another pair of glasses for reading. I do. I have just kind of regular glasses I wear that You know, they can see up close and they can see far away and they do all the right stuff. And then I have a pair of glasses that I use when I sit in front of the computer because they are larger and they’re kind of at a fixed magnification, which reduces a lot of neck strain and it’s just a lot more comfortable to work with.

Well, I spent a good portion of time working on this project wearing my regular glasses and just not quite being being able to see what I was looking at. And then it dawned on me this morning, oh, put on your reading glasses, dummy. Things will be a lot clearer. And sure enough, they were. So good lighting, glasses, maybe if you don’t even think you need them, or even big magnifying glasses can be really handy in situations like that.

Well, that’s what I learned from getting a new dishwasher and not paying someone to install it. And I guess that lesson was probably worth $150. So there you go.