Everything and the kitchen sink!

I've been brushing up on my "Consumer Reports" reading while on the train to work in preparation of our kitchen remodel. One of the appliances Prince Charming and I are looking forward to most is a dishwasher. Maybe more him than me since he does most of the dishes while I do most of the cooking. In any case, I intend to make an informed decision about our new appliance and first read the article about dishwashers and all the different features. I thought, "Low noise sounds like it'll be important to us in our small house and the grinding feature that is like a garbage disposal in the dishwasher (instead of cleaning a filter) sounds worthwhile too!" Simple enough, right? Unfortunately it looks like those two features don't go well together. Not to mention as I start reading throught the rankings, it appears that and of the top performing machines are $700 plus! For a dishwasher. Are you kidding me?! Of course there is a $400 model much further down in the rankings, but I had no idea dishwashers cost so much! I can't believe it.

After getting shocked by dishwashers, a little later today I was thinking about sinks. Now, I had the idea that since our sink configuration isn't changing that we could keep our sink. Sure it's old, but we've found that a little Ajax makes that baby look whiter than the sun. Prince Charming shot down my proposition. So in the interest of being a good wife I looked up sinks. While up until recently I am against apron front sinks (aka farm sink), I've been thinking it might not be so bad. I went to a certain big box hardware store website and searched "apron sink" thinking that they might start around $100. HAH. You know what they start at? $700!!! Are you kidding me? And they can be in the thousands! For a sink! Maybe I'm missing something and there's really a dishwasher built in? Regular sinks do, however, start lower. I still don't understand why we should replace our perfectly good sink? We just need to add a garbage disposal and we'd be golden.

I learned today that this kitchen thing is going to be expensive. I mean, I knew that already. But this snapped me back to reality. Maybe I should set up a fund.