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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Goodbye Trash Compactor! The Wednesday Before & After Quickie

The Wednesday (Not so) Quickie Before & After

When we purchased our new old house a few years ago we became the proud owners of a 20 year old trash compactor.  I'm sure it was awesome in it's day - but it's day had come AND gone.  It moaned, it groaned, it sounded like a dying dinosaur (not that I've ever heard the sound of a dying dinosaur, but I can imagine it would sound like this.)  I used this awful sounding appliance off and on to smash my recycling cardboard and plastics but NEVER ran it when guests were in the house.  Recently I decided to use it every day to see if it would totally die. The door kept pitching to the side and getting stuck when I turned it on.  One day it ran for 30 minutes and I finally turned it off, which of course meant the "ram" was stuck in the down position.  Also, the switch broke and fell inside the cover panel. I declared this trash compactor officially dead.

The most common replacement items for trash compactor these days are

1) A large deep drawer that holds a trash bag/can

2) A narrow wine cooler designed specifically to fit where an old TC has been removed

Option Number One requires a cabinet builder and trying to match the sad 25 year old stain color on my cabinets - I don't want to add to these cabinets I would prefer to get rid of the doors and have them all refaced.

Option Number Two is a pretty easy project which we could do ourselves and by WE of course I mean my hero, SuperDave.

I found an amazing deal on a wine cooler at my favorite place to shop - THE INTERNET and ordered up a nice new 15" wide replacement for the sad trash compactor.  It was delivered on a Thursday night and YES my hero husband went right to work as soon as he got home removing the old dead dinosaur trash compactor.

This is the best before shot I was able to get. He had removed the front panel so he could get to the broken switch to get the ram up faster than I could grab my camera.  So this is what it looked like after the bucket drawer thingy and the panel were removed.



The next step is to get it out with ceramic tile at the bottom and the overhang of the granite countertop above.  My husband was talking about removing tile but we only have one replacement tile. Now as badly as this tile needs replaced it's not a DIY project as far as I'm concerned because there are SO many square feet of it and I think it might physically kill me to grout that much tile at my age.  So I suggested pulling the panel off the back of the bar and removing the TC out the back side.  Fortunately the man has MAJOR skills and this worked great.


There were some scary dust bunnies hiding under there.


I was helping during this process, here are my tools - vacuum and flashlight  


 And here are SuperDave's tools
 
The new wine cooler slid right in from the back and
after some adjustments,
he put the cabinet back together. 



I really wanted the stainless trimmed cooler, but since all the appliances in my kitchen are black including the beautiful Dacor double ovens and 5 burner gas range, we'll stick with the black.  One stainless item would have looked out of place.


I did manage to whip up a nice pot of Chicken Tortilla Soup Chili (it cooked down a little while I was holding the flashlight) during the installation.




Not too shabby for a a Thursday evening!



Live, Love, Laugh,

Laura


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