Folks, it’s a red-letter day here in the dollhouse. Aside from The Electrician once again being the only non-neutered party in the place since Quest was fixed this week, lots of changes are in the works. My sweetie is currently asserting his masculinity by installing our brand-new appliance: a dishwasher.

That’s right. Mr. and Mrs. Sparky have invested in modern daily living. The dollhouse harkens back to 1950, where the official dishwasher generally wore ruffled aprons, made Jell-o for fancy occasions, and mixed a mean after-work gin and tonic. Of all the above, I do own several ruffled aprons, but since a second person has officially moved into the place, the dollhouse desperately needed to catch up to the 21st century. Dirty dishes are a major romance killer. We can’t wait to load them up, close the door, and press the button to start the magic cleaning cycle.

The only real downside of installing a dishwasher in this wee house how much cupboard space it will devour. Buying a full-size 24 inch machine was out of the question, since there was no place we could put one without creating a situation where we could not reach the cupboards to put our clean dishes away while the dishwasher door was open. Luckily for us, a few companies make mini dishwashers that measure 18 inches wide, and we have a bottom cupboard that is exactly big enough for those models.

After doing my homework about these “apartment size” models, I learned that most of them are absolute garbage, making the forecast for buying one and living happily ever after pretty bleak. Based on my research, the only really impressive models in small dishwashers are made by lovely German people. I hunted around and found a Bosch model in stainless steel with all the bells and whistles, on sale even. We won’t discuss the fact that we paid more for the petite version than most people do for a full-sized dishwasher, because at least it was on sale; some things are worth getting a little spendy on.

As I type this, the whole kitchen is torn apart for this long-awaited installation. All the cabinets near the excavation site are empty so nothing precious or critically useful gets accidentally broken. Luckily, all these household changes are keeping us on our toes and even the mammals are getting caught up in the excitement. It has almost taken our minds off the fact that winter is already stomping closer to Alberta: the crisp mornings are proof.

Hopefully, we will be washing dishes the nifty, modern way in a few more hours. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my husband? After all, he can fix just about anything.

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