Shopping for very large metal things

Yesterday my husband and I strolled up Broadway on a rather warm foggy evening and window shopped for big machines. We discovered that a really good gas range costs upwards of a thousand dollars for a 24 inch wide model. Those fancy ones have easy clean burner tops, sturdy knobs and oven doors that open with a satisfying well balanced thunk. The cheap one we had installed after the fire in our building, is working but the handles are smashed, the top is chipped--it now looks like it is 40 rather than 7 years old--and the oven itself is temperature iffy. Ugh. But a thousand bucks to cook lasagna? When the hotbox we have works? Gonna wait.

The under the sink dishwasher is very expensive to replace. We went through heck trying to get GE to fix the one we have. They sent a guy, whose visit cost half the price of a new dishwasher, he said we needed a new part for the pump because a piece of glass had torn the seal. It worked in a leaky but not pouring sort of way. He would come back once the part was sent. Then three times running GE sent us a new fridge light. We could not get the part we needed to fix the pump. Phone calls were useless, they just sent the light bulb again saying this was the part the service guy had asked for. They offered to send another service guy to look at things for half the cost of a new dishwasher... so we could not ever get it resolved. We have been without a dishwasher for two years. The only under the sink dishwasher available in the city is, you got it, the same GE model. The cost of a new one, delivery and hook up is about a thousand dollars. Or we hand wash. But wouldn't fixing the one we have be the most economical approach? Apparently GE won't service us ever again if we don't use their crack team... And we know how that worked out. A plumber is our only hope. For non DUI types like myself, ignoring the broken space hog under the sink has been the easiest thing. But no more, my new years resolution, fixed dishwasher or new storage space!