Ode to Ovens Old and New

I feel like buying an oven is my first really big adult purchase. I bought an appliance so I must be a grown up now, right? Of course it was also quite necessary and I'm totally excited to have a new oven. Our old one was about 45 years old, so to say that it was time is quite the understatement.

It was a charming shade of avocado green--not captured in all it's vibrancy in these pictures--and possessed of peeling paint.

Dating from the days before self-cleaning ovens, and owned by lazy people who rarely cooked, its interior was less than immaculate.

It was none of these features, however, that convinced us to dump our faithful oven for a younger, sexier model. Sure, it may have been nearly a quarter-century older than either of us, but we like to think we could have made the age difference work. Sadly the oven had a fatal flaw. Whatever doohickey regulated its temperature no longer worked, so it was always either off or on it's way to 525 degrees. The only way to control the temperature was to monitor it with a thermometer and open and close the oven door--all the way because you couldn't open it a crack the way you can a young, fit model--and you just can't bake that way. Everything comes out icky and unevenly cooked. Or it burns on one side and not on the other.

So it was that we bought a new oven. And while we bought the stove Consumer Report rated at the best value and it is by any definition a cheap stove, it is an unavoidable fact that compared to the old stove it is rather beautiful.

Oh, and if anyone reading this has ever wondered what the floor under something that hasn't been moved in over forty years would look like, wonder no more. It would look like this:
Lovely, huh?