Quote Originally Posted by withm View Post
It's a shame that it costs more to repair small appliances than to replace them. My toaster oven has a precarious switch interlock with the oven door that it can be quite tricky to get it to work. At 15 yrs old, I've probably gotten my money's worth, but I sure wish it weren't such a PIA to get it to toast! I can always toast on the broil setting but then I'd have to watch it so I could flip the bread over to toast the other side.
Ain't that the truth?

We had a toaster oven that we basically melted. I forget what we did, but it was a miracle we didn't burn the house down. By rare coincidence, we were at good will the next day for something else when we noticed the same exact toaster oven on their shelves. It was missing some stuff, but we bought it anyway and between the two of them, we were able to put together a fully working toaster oven that we still use to this day (3 years later)! The 'parts' oven went to the dump so I'm sure it's in a land-fill somewhere but at least we were able to get one of them working properly without having to buy a new one.

Lately, we've been in a place where we can afford to really shop around and buy high quality stuff. We have a vacuum that is almost all metal, sucks like a champ and should work for 20 years (even with the heavy shed of our animals!). We recently did the same for our mattress. And for our canner and our dehydrator. Clearly, I need to do the same with a blender purchase! I get so tired of having to replace stuff because it dies entirely too early in it's lifecycle!