Now a few months into its ninth year and we have probably spent more on maintenance than we paid for it. But no complaints: we like the cooker and don't want to change it.
All this prompted by a bit of maintenance last week, needed when the door to the main oven started to fall apart. This door has a steel back frame with its glass window, with a fancier glass sheet over the whole of the front. Now the current fashion in kitchenware is that all the fixings should be invisible; housewives don't want to know about all the messy details; they want a nice, clean & uncluttered appearance. So how do we fix the glass front - quite a heavy thing, maybe 0.5 cm thick - to the back frame? We are OK at the top because the clean & uncluttered appearance does allow a handle, the fixing for which can be used to hide the fixing for the top of the glass front. But this does not work at the bottom, where, instead, we have a metal fitting glued to the back of the glass front with some kind of black mastic stuff. Black mastic stuff which broke down after 8 years and left the door in a rather flappy condition. A flappy condition which could only be corrected by total replacement of the glass front - about £80 worth to you or me - which presumably came with the black mastic stuff and its fitting ready attached.
Wouldn't it have been simpler and more robust to allow a couple of holes at the bottom of the front? It should not have been beyond the wit of one of these chaps with a masters degree in design to make a feature of the fixing, pleasing enough to keep the most discerning housewife happy.
It is an interesting feature of the design world that sometimes it is good to hide how things work and sometimes it is good to show. Sometimes it is even better to make a feature of things which look as if they are what make a thing work but which are actually entirely decorative.
So on the whole, with kitchen furniture, it is good to hide. All the things which fix fronts onto frames and carcasses have to be invisible - something which cunning modern fixings make possible. With a lot of wooden furniture, old style, one went to a lot of bother to make joints invisible: double stopped dovetails and all that sort of thing. Whereas with some jeans one includes a lot of prominent stitching, stitching which I suspect has nothing to do with holding the jeans together. Buildings can get very complicated. So the famous fan vaults of places like King's College Chapel do not have all that much to do with holding the roof up, despite the appearance of the thing. The fan vault is decorative, but looking as if it is not is all part of the design and the attraction. The fancy stonework of the huge columns holding up the nave walls of cathedrals is similarly phony, the only structural role of the fancy stonework being to act as a container for the rubbly concrete inside which actually carries the weight. The fancy stonework which often clads modern buildings is often just that, cladding. Attractive looking panels which look pretty, which add a great deal of weight and which do little for the structure, apart perhaps from providing a little stiffening. The fancy pipe work which often festoons the outside of modern buildings is, in a similar way, largely cladding. It might have a structural function, but a function which could have been satisfied with a lot less pipe work, had one so chosen. The striving for a visible & honest blend of structure and function, which some architects between the two world wars aspired to, seems to be a long way away.
The good news is that we are very happy with our service agreement with Indesit-Hotpoint. Not cheap, but they get fitters to your house in good order and the job gets done. None of this rather unreliable word of mouth stuff from some chap in the pub: just pick up the phone and the thing is done. The men in the white vans had better get their act together or they are going to lose a lot of business to these call centre driven operations.
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