Take a seat in my dream kitchen
When we moved into our flat we bought a lot of fixtures and fittings, including all the kitchen appliances, from the previous resident. I was delighted to find out we'd inherited a dual-fuel cooker (i.e. gas hob, electric oven).
I've grown up with dual-fuel cookers, and always assumed that in the heady future of having my own kitchen, rather than the get-what-you're-given of shared houses, it's what I would choose. People with modern induction hobs tell me they're great, but I'm still pinning my money on gas. Our current cooker even has a monster rocket burner in one corner for stir frying. I like it.
Not long after moving in, we discovered that our oven was scared of high temperatures. Fine for most things, but if you put it up to pastry temperature it turns itself off. Which is annoying, but work-roundable. (The work-around is to get it up to temperature, get your pie in asap, and then keep the door shut. It is obviously not to stop making pies.)
The electric ignition for the gas hobs is a bit capricious and regularly spits away to itself when the cooker is not in use.
Some vital and terribly custom bit is missing from the inside of the oven, which makes the shelves wonky.
All of which we've got used to. The chap who came to fix the dishwasher diagnosed the problem with high temperatures: the oven's cooling fan is broken. So it overheats, panics, and the safety shut off kicks in. This also explains why the control dials get too hot to touch, and probably also why it's a bit fast. He also reckoned on £100 for a new fan, plus fitting, and suggested a new cooker.
We've been muddling along. Except now our oven has got a TARDIS. We're not really sure how or why, but whenever it's on, a TARDIS intermittently arrives and departs. We can hear it. The risk of dimensional rifts in our pies is great. Possibly also oven explosions.
So we've decided to replace the cooker.
So, the shopping list didn't seem complicated. 60cm wide dual-fuel cooker. With wok-burner. And programmable timer. Double oven.
That turns out to be complicated enough. If you add in details like wanting it to look nice, and an integrated ignition rather than a separate button, and for the dials to be labelled in such a way that you can read them... it's impossible.
Firstly, most dual-fuel cookers are huge range affairs with four ovens and upwards of six burners. Which is lovely, but the kitchen ain't that big. Of the 60cm free standing cookers, most don't have wok burners. Very few have programmable timers The chap in John Lewis tells me that manufacturers are going off programmable timers. He had no idea why, given that they are incredibly useful and have existed in ovens at least since I was little.
Sensibly, all UK kitchen units and cookers are a standard height (900mm). However! The person who fitted out our flat had... interesting ideas. If you are a skilled tradesperson coming to repair or replace something for us, the first thing you will say is "I've never seen one like that before" or "that's not a standard model/type/connection". The last plumber was defeated in turn by our shower, our bathroom tap and our kitchen tap (though I suspect he might have been a bit rubbish).
Against all probability, our cooker is a standard width. Are it and our worktops the standard height? Of course not. They are taller. So any cooker we buy will sit lower than the worktop, offering attractive corners for grot and gribble to collect in. We did find one cooker the right height, but buying that would commit us to high work surfaces if we ever redo the kitchen.
We do plan to redo the kitchen. Just not now, and probably not in the next few years. In fact we probably expect to do it in a window which falls after the expiration of our existing cooker, and a while before the expiration of any replacement. A redone kitchen might want a built-in oven and separate hob but there's no way we can realistically incorporate such a thing into what's there now.
So, the probable plan is: buy a too-short cooker, which probably doesn't have all the features we want, and quit whinging :)
If anyone has any good recommendations for cooker browsing, please shout up. We ran out of ideas after John Lewis and PCWorldKitchen Currys. That's browsing in the real, for preference, since all online specs seem to be full of lies, and don't tend to say things like "incredibly flimsy dials that will clearly break in under a year".