Stubborn Oven Gets a Facelift.

There’s something exciting about coming home on your lunch break and seeing a huge box on your front porch, especially 2 days after you ordered it, and about 5 days before it was set to arrive.  You guessed it, the black oven top to my Stubbron Oven  (mentioned here) arrived 5 days before scheduled…whoot, whoot!

I couldn’t resist, I had to open the box and see what my oven top looked like.  To be honest, I really wanted to make sure it was black.

It was definitely black…woooha!!  Now the 10 million dollar the question, was the GE phone rep correct saying that it was inter-changeable with my white top?  Tuli and Ninka sniffed around as well, they also questioned the accuracy of the phone rep ((probably) in a third world country).

Ryan said it was a quick 5 minute job, so he installed it that night.  I really didn’t believe “5 minute job”, but it totally was!!!

If you member, this is what our stove previously looked like with that awful white, mismatched top:

After removing the coils, we were able to lift up the white top to get a look at the electrical.

Yep, that’s probably 20 years of cooking residue under there…GROSS!  The electrical was easily removed by unscrewing a few brackets.

There were two screws on each back corner keeping the top in place, so once they were removed, out came the white cooktop!

White top removed, we could break out the new black beauty and get her into place!  Can you tell I am slightly excited?!  It really is the little things in life.

Putting in black beauty (the new top) was the backwards version of taking out the white top (obviously).  We (that’s the Ryan part of we) screwed in the back hinges then re-connected the wiring for the burners.

I was a little skeptical that Ryan replaced each burner in the correct space (since he didn’t mark them), but man, he has a good memory.  After checking to make sure the right front burner turned on with it’s knob, etc…he was right on point!  Damn, I love this man!  The final product is definitely not a $1,600 stainless unit, but I must say it looks one thousand percent better now that it’s all black.  That white top on black body combination was just too out there for me.  Here is our final product:

She’s a beaut.

Budget breakdown:

• Cooktop= About $100 for the replacement.
• Hardware= used existing hardware, screws, etc…
• labor= free!

It’s amazing how different the space looks with a black cooktop (and booya!  It was only a cool 100 bones).  Of course that can’t be the end of of it though. Now that the top is all beautiful, cohesive, and black….the coils look so 1970 and dingy.  I went to price out 4 new coils, would you believe those suckers run about $30 bucks a pop?  yep, it will cost us over one hundred dollars (more than the top itself) to replace all 4 coils.  argh. And so the cookie crumbles!

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P.S. stay tuned this week, we went tile shopping and brought home about 10 different sample boards this weekend!