Here's where the realities of home repair set in. If you buy a dishwasher from GiantMart or EnormoStore, they send along a nice young man to install it for you. Buy it off the Internet (or some hippie's e-mail ad) and you'll be down on your knees all weekend with a pipe wrench. Unless you're me – then you first have to buy said pipe wrench, and then get on your knees. Replacing a dishwasher is ostensibly one of the easier upgrades the average house monkey can perform. (And, as any shiny-smiley real estate agent will tell you, new appliances in the kitchen can bump a home's sale price significantly.) All you have to do is disconnect its water supply and electrical supply, pull it out of the wall, throw in the new one, reconnect the water and electrics, and get busy with the Seventh Generation eco-powder.

Unless, again, you're me, and you bought a house from someone who, rather than building to code, just sort of, you know, winged it. What's interesting about our house is that Paul – even as he built up this fabulously remodeled kitchen with skylights and elaborate tiling and woodwork and a delicate little minibar – refused to replace anything that wasn’t broken. We've got the 30-year-old dishwasher, an oven from the era of disco, and a gas range that maybe – maybe – can boil a small pot of already-hot water. But only in summer.

So when Paul remodeled the kitchen sometime back in the '90s, he didn't bother to upgrade the appliances, but rather built around them. (The Apostle of Reuse or just a bit of a skimper?) Case in point: the dishwasher. Normally, all a dishwasher's pipes and hoses end up under the sink, where they join with the general water-and-waste action: the hot- and cold-water pipes, In-Sink-Erators, and drain pipes. So it's nice to have the sink pretty close to the dishwasher, so you don't have to run miles of piping and whatnot behind your cabinets. Before Paul’s remodel, our sink used to sit parallel to old Klanky, like this:

(That’s the new Whirlpool, post install, not the original 1970s monster. And that squiggly red thing is a drawing of the old sink. Pardon my artistic skills.) Klanky’s pipes ran to the right, right next door under the old sink. But Paul, in his cracked wisdom, decided to put his new sink in at a right angle to the dishwasher.

Like so:

Not a big deal when you're putting new cabinets in: Everything was exposed, and Paul was able to bend the piping as he saw fit and pop it in before dropping the cabinets on top, leaving the old dishwasher right where it was. But trying to crank new dishwasher fittings onto old, bent pipes, around a corner and behind some cabinets? Neither smart nor easy. Copper pipes are malleable, but not that friendly. After about 394 trips to the hardware store over the course of an entire weekend – by car! awesome! – I ended up running four feet of flexible supply line – basically a bendy tube encased in braided stainless steel – from the dishwasher, through a cabinet wall, under and through another cabinet's floor to the hot-water supply under the sink.

Follow the red line:

Do note Paul's placement of an exposed, non-GFCI electrical outlet under the sink – which is to say, the best place to shock somebody. Basically, GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) outlets can tell when someone's about to get an electrical shock – like, say, when they're working on the plumbing under the sink – and trip the circuit before too much damage can happen. A nice thing to have where water and electricity are involved. Also note the wine cork plugging the In-Sink-Erator overflow. I mean, what the hell, right? Works, don't it?

At any rate, the end result is a much cleaner setup behind the cabinets. And much cleaner dishes – using much less water – than we were getting washing by hand, for only a weekend full of work. In a future post, after I’ve installed more energy-lite appliances, I’ll break down the savings by the numbers: how much natural gas, how much electricity, and how much money we’re saving with each of these improvements. But for now, leave me to sleep, lullabyed by the hum of my new dishwasher.

NEXT TIME: What I’m up against: A tour of some of Boulder’s super-efficient houses.