It’s been a little over a year since our dishwasher died. We bought it about a year after we bought our house, so it was somewhere around three years old when it decided it no longer wanted to work. So, just old enough to be out of warrantee.

Yeah, life’s funny sometimes.

So, I was left with a 3 year old dishwasher that wouldn’t stop running its water pump, would not respond to the control panel, and eventually just had to have its breaker flipped to get some peace in my kitchen.

I looked at what my limited skillset and knowledge would let me, and I could find nothing wrong. The appliance repairman charges $150 to come to the house for an hour, and parts can get expensive. I paid about $450 for the darned thing on sale, so paying 1/3 of its price tag to get it looked at before paying for parts and an actual fix just didn’t seem to make sense.

And to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t happy with the contraption anyway. Being as young as it is, it’s one of those modern, highly efficient, ineffective models. You know, the kind where you basically have to hand wash the dishes, arrange them perfectly, run the water until it’s as hot as you can, then set it to run overnight because the super-duper-this-time-for-sure cycle takes between four and six hours to complete. We used top of the line detergent and ran the cleaning cycle every weekend.

And still, fully 1/3 of the dishes would be unclean in some way when I cracked it open to empty it the next morning.

It made me misty to remember the dishwasher my maternal grandmother had, which would probably have done a really good job cleaning the rust and scale off of a marine diesel had it been given the chance and strong enough detergent.

But hey, the new dishwashers use half the electricity and water per cycle. Granted, I had to run a sink full of water to ‘pre-wash’ everything, and still had to run the dishes through multiple cycles to get them clean, but progress is progress, I guess.

I looked at the next step up for a dishwasher, but the price curve between “It’ll likely clean some of your dishes” to “It’ll likely clean most of your dishes” is pretty steep.

Did I mention that I’m a cheap bastard?

So, being stubborn, I fished the dishrack out from under the sink, retrieved a scrubby pad from the box I keep down in the garage, and just started doing our dishes by hand. I figured that eventually the Venn diagram of “I remember we need a new dishwasher” and “The price of a decentish dishwasher that doesn’t require me to cosplay as a scullery maid to get the cereal bowls clean comes down a tad” would become more than two circles orbiting each other.

This morning, 13 months later, I invested in a couple of silicone drying mats to go next to the dishrack so that I could retire the Super Mario Brothers beach towel I’ve been using for large pans and overflow when we cook a big meal. Thanksgiving is coming, after all.

Over that time, a strange thing has happened – I started to sort of enjoy the twice-daily chore of doing dishes. Now, there are only the three of us in the house, and we rarely make anything that takes more than a couple of pots. It’s not like I’m cleaning up after feeding a farm crew or having to sanitize baby bottles for triplets or anything like that. A couple of glasses, some plates and bowls, some silverware and cutlery, and whatever pots and pans we use is about it. Total, it’s less than 30 minutes a day, and I’m not afraid to scrape a pan as best I can, fill it with hot sudsy water, and let it sit in the sink to be done with the breakfast dishes.

During that time, I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or music. Hot water feels really good on aching hands, and the new puppy has learned that if she lays down on my feet while I’m standing at the sink, she gets a treat when I’m done.

It’s pleasant, and not a bad way to spend half an hour. Organizing the dishes, rinsing/scrubbing them, loading the dishwasher, then unloading it the next morning takes almost as long, so the convenience really isn’t there.

So, for now, I’m going to keep at it with a dishcloth, a plastic scraper-thingie, and a labrador retriever. Someday, appliances will get good enough that a quick rinse and a couple of hours are good enough to justify the cost, but for now, I’ll just keep doing them by hand.