Major appliances and sofa - done!

We're going to be the proud owners of our very own appliances and a sofa! Yes, after weeks of shopping trips and research, we have finally purchased a fridge, stove, and washer for the house, as well as the sofa we decided on yesterday.

After much thinking, we decided to go with Sears for the appliances because they have a good warranty and the company has been around for so long and is so big that if we run into problems, they'll still be around. We started off at Sears Home, where we'd originally seen a lot of stuff, but when we were there there was practically nothing on the floor. I became very disappointed and overwhelmed by this because we didn't want to just put in an order without looking at the appliances again and checking them out. So we went to the Sears at the nearby mall and bought the appliances there. They had such a great selection!

We ended up buying Kenmore appliances because the brand is fairly reliable and the warranty is good. We bought this bottom-freezer, french-door fridge (made by Amana, we think). The freezer has wire cage bins that promote air circulation and the fridge has all the adjustable shelves and extra storage areas that we wanted.

We bought this slide-in dual-fuel white Kenmore range. We decided on a slide-in model so that the oven controls were at the front of the stove instead of the back so that I don't have to try to reach over pots on the stove to get at the oven. Also, we get the gas cooktop, which we wanted, and the electric oven, which we're used to. All we have to do is hook up the gas (we elected to have Sears do it) and we don't have to touch the electric. The only extra warranty we bought was for this range because we've read that the electronic control pad is especially vulnerable to heat and breaking on this type of model.

Choosing the washer turned out to be a bit more complicated. Our plan had been to buy an LG washer but after talking with the sales guy we decided on a Kenmore (made by Samsung) front-loading washer because of the way it balanced the load. The LG balances an unbalanced load electronically while the Samsung/Kenmore uses ball bearings to mechanically balance the load. The sales guy actually demonstrated the washer spinning a single towel (definitely an unbalanced load) and we were impressed with how it balanced the little load.

We also upgraded the washer to have a drum with smaller holes so that clothes wouldn't get forced into them when spinning. The drum has a dimpled design and somehow it works. This washer also has a sanitize cycle and a quick cycle, just like the one we'd been considering before. We'd been hoping to get a white washer but the only choices were dark blue and flame red... so we picked the dark blue. It won't go with our white dryer but that's ok with us. We ended up purchasing this washer.

Lucky for us, Sears was having a sale on these appliances and we also had a coupon to save on appliances from our home inspection company so we ended up saving quite a bit on these purchases. Plus we got a Sears card with a big points club multiplier which will give us cash back or a Sears gift card or something so we saved even more.

We'd thought that it would take no time at all to order these appliances but in the end we spent about two hours looking at and actually going through the purchase process. We wanted to be done then but sadly, we still needed to buy the couch we picked out. Since we went to all that trouble yesterday to choose it we figured we should order it because it'll take five or six weeks to arrive. We thought the ordering process should take no time at all because we'd already made our decisions but it ended up taking another hour.

This time we snapped a photo of the main and accent fabrics for you:

Sofa fabric
Main fabric on the bottom
Patterned accent (pillow) fabric on top

The colours aren't quite perfect in the picture, but the main fabric is a light grey-taupe. One thing I love about the accent fabric is that each of those rectangles is a different texture. While we were waiting for the purchase to go through I played with the accent fabric, running my fingers over it and tracing out all the lines.

It turns out that the store will allow us to borrow their fabric samples anytime if we need them. We can also order the fabric itself if we wanted to make curtains or upholster or cover another piece of furniture. I could see that accent fabric on a chair of some kind, maybe.

After spending all this money we thought we were finished shopping Until we remembered that we still need to buy a dinette set. We know what we want and just have to find it so we'll look for it this week. Once that's done we won't be buying anything more until we're in the house.... although we do have our eye on Palliser Rhumba theater seating (with power recline). It's the most comfortable theater seating ever and the power recline is fantastic, but we can't buy it until we know what space we're using and how we're going to set it up.