In my last column I talked about our quest to buy a new dishwasher. In case you missed it, I was totally convinced when our adventure started that I knew exactly what I wanted — a futuristic study in stainless steel kitchen tech. Luckily, my wife was kind enough to explain that I was a complete idiot.

The whole episode turned out pretty well, though. We ended up finding just what we needed, and I inexplicably lucked out, ending up with a really super-cool black monolith of a dishwasher I call "Darth Vader."

When we bought Darth, the sales woman offered to have her store's experts install him in our kitchen for an additional $85. Since I already had a dishwasher the same size as the one we were buying, I thought to myself, "How hard can it be? Unhook the water, power, and drain from the old one, then hook 'em up to the new one. An hour at the most. $85? For that? Pah!" 

I smiled jauntily at the sales woman and said, "Pah!"

It was going to take a week to get Darth delivered. This was ideal, since it would give me plenty of time to get the old dishwasher out and to prepare the space under the counter to receive the new one. My wife spent the week making sure that the plumber, electrician, a good carpenter, and emergency medical services were all properly set up in the speed dial.

Almost immediately a little hitch came up. We've been in this house for 18 years, and the old dishwasher had been here for at least 10 years before that. I quickly discovered that nuts, bolts, washers and electrical connectors sort of petrify in place over that amount of time, so what I was doing was really more of an archeological dig.

Still, with the help of my friend Scott, several cans of WD-40 and a few skinned knuckles, we managed to muscle the old dishwasher out of the kitchen and out onto the deck.

Peering into what would soon be Darth's Lair, it became obvious that the guys who installed the old dishwasher were mainly equipped with a couple of six packs and a lot of imagination. What they apparently did not have was a set of building codes. For instance, I was alarmed at the sight of eight seemingly random-sized chunks of pipe welded together to form the hot water feed.

But then I decided that the old dishwasher had worked just fine for a long, long time, so whatever Booze Brothers did way back then must have been all right. And besides, all the final fittings and connections were probably pretty standard. "Pah!" I thought.

Finally, the big day came. Looking back, I might have seen it as an omen that Darth's box was a tad larger than I had been planning for, and ripped the latch off the door-wall on the way in, but at the time I was too excited to care.

Darth came with a handy "Installation Kit," a large plastic bag containing an impressive selection of brass fittings, wires, connectors, hoses, and instructions. I particularly enjoyed the instructions, with headlines like, "!Avertissement!" over drawings of silhouette hands being sliced apart by moving parts, or fried by electrical current, or of silhouette installers being crushed by falling silhouette dishwashers.

Interestingly, not one of the brass fittings, wires, connectors or hoses in the bag bore any relationship to those "probably pretty standard" fittings and connections in the Lair. And the old wiring was about six inches too short. And the new dishwasher used a drain hose totally different from and incompatible with the old one. And the eight seemingly randomly sized chunks of pipe welded together to form the water feed turned out to be anomalous in our physical universe.

It took seven trips to the hardware store and about 12 hours of work to get Darth properly settled in his Lair. I did not lose any fingers or toes, and not all that much blood. When my wife acted a little bit nervous about the first test run, I glowered at her and said, "I find your lack of faith... disturbing." She just rolled her eyes, pushed the "Start" button - and the dishes got clean!

So if you should happen to need a dishwasher installed, feel free to drop me an email with the word "Pah!" in the subject line. I'll find somebody to loan you the $85.

Mike Ball is the Erma Bombeck Award-winning author of "What I've Learned So Far..." and the book "What I've Learned So Far... Part I: Bikes, Docks & Slush Nuggets".