We realized that we don’t actually need to wait for the new kitchen before we buy a new stove. All we needed was the new kitchen design, which gave us the measurements. The best design we came up with was built around the same sized stove as we have today – reducing it to the standard 60 cm wouldn’t give us any benefits.

The best thing with the new stove is that it is not broken, haha. The oven door can be opened and closed without special grips and secret handshakes, and it won’t fall off. As a side benefit we also get a much larger oven. Interestingly, ovens in 70 cm stoves are no larger than ovens in 60 cm stoves – one oven size fits all.

The really modern/trendy approach would have been to buy a separate oven and a stovetop, and the latter would be induction based rather than ceramic. Stoves are gradually going out of fashion. But the induction stovetops all have touch controls rather than knobs you can turn, and for me that is a non-starter. Touch controls don’t work well with my fingers. Our tumble dryer has them and I often have to press three or four times before my touch is registered. We had horrible microwave ovens at work that required sliding to set the time and I hated them with a passion. I found them totally unusable. Imagine doing that every time I am cooking, with spills and hot pans nearby. Nope. Plus the whole induction thing seems somewhat hit and miss. I read enough reports about high-pitched whining noises, rings turning themselves off unpredictably, cases where turning on the largest ring reduces power on all the others, etc, to put me off the idea completely. This relatively old-fashioned but stable and solid solution is good enough for me.

The workmen installing the new stove noted that our kitchen slants, and the two countertops to the left and right of the stove are not of equal height. Now the new stove is level on an absolute scale but not relative to anything else in the house.