Balcom Agency

I'm not strong enough. I'll never manage. It's going to be too hard. I can't lift it. I can't ever do it alone. Why? Because I'm a girl.

I bought my house in 2005, and despite two summers of excruciating electric bills, there weren't many problems. As it turns out, the thermostat installed didn't work with the heat pump I have, so the unit would run and run but never cool the house down or heat it up. All in all, I considered this a minor bump in the road.

Early this year, the water heater went out followed swiftly by the dishwasher. As a single-income household, one big ticket item failure after another has the ability to drain my bank account with lighting speed. Thankfully, I got a super incredible deal on my dishwasher which helped the situation to be not quite as painful, but still – nobody wakes up and says, "You know – I was thinking I'd like to spend a lot of money on an appliance that everybody knows won't last!" Grumbling and disappointments aside, I tried to find some light in this seemingly bleak situation. It was at this point that I thought: I'll install it myself.

I had no reason to install this dishwasher myself other than I wanted to prove that I could do it. I wanted to know that I didn't need anybody to do it for me. I wanted to not be the "helper" handing over screwdrivers and other tools. I wanted to do it myself.

The trick to installing your own dishwasher is getting it in the house. At 5'2", I have almost no ground clearance, so assuming I had an ounce up upper body strength (I don't), there was no way I'd get it off the ground (I couldn't). One might then think: hey, you could use a dolly! If I had one, I sure could! So I did what anybody would do: I pushed really hard. After (finally) getting the new dishwasher into the house, I had to uninstall the old one.

1. Turn off the breaker and water line.
2. Unscrew the screws holding the dishwasher to the counter.
3. Pull. Hard.
4. Disconnect electrical and water lines from the unit.
5. Push out of the way.

By now, one hour (or so) had passed. I took a break for dinner before starting to install the new unit which, essentially was the uninstall in reverse.

1. Push unit very close to the opening in the cabinets.
2. Connect the electrical and water lines to the unit.
3. Push. Hard.

Unfortunately there was a (wee) problem at this point, so I stopped for the evening and went to my parents to tell my dad face-to-face that I had installed the dishwasher by myself. OH! How gratifying...

The next day, he had to come over to help me figure out why I couldn't get the unit all the way into the cubbie. As it turned out, there was a yahootis pointing out of the wall which we all later learned could be reversed to allow the unit to slide all the way back into the cubbie.

And just like that – I was finished!

1. Screw the screws holding the dishwasher to the counter.
2. Turn on the breaker and water lines.
3. Test.

Note: it is entirely possible that I waited at least two weeks to run my dishwasher because I was terrified that I had done something wrong and feared that it would leak water all over my kitchen. It is also possible that the first time I ran the dishwasher, I bolted into the kitchen every fifteen minutes to ensure that it was not, in fact, leaking all over my kitchen.

Could I have paid the guy at Lowes to install it? Sure. Would it have been easier to have my dad install the unit? Of course. Was all of the pushing and shoving worth being able to say that I installed a dishwasher by myself? Absolutely.

What have you done to either surprise yourself or make you totally proud of something you did?