When we looked at our rental house, we said we’d take it almost immediately, but it wasn’t until we got home that we realized it didn’t have a dishwasher. Was this a deal breaker for us? It wasn’t, but made us think. My resourceful wife looked on Craigslist and found a portable dishwasher within a few days. I picked it up for $65 and brought it home.
After we moved into the rental, I got a $5 part from The Home Depot to hook it to the kitchen faucet and then we tested it out. So now that we had a working dishwasher albeit a little inconvenient, the question comes down to will we use it or wash dishes by hand? In our first few days in the house, the question answered itself. We’ve loaded up the dishwasher and run it every few days.
I have no problem washing dishes after family comes over or there are a lot of dishes, but washing a bunch of silverware, glasses, and plates is for the birds. It is time consuming and, in fact, uses much more water than a dishwasher. I know that people survived without dishwashers, but they also survived without computers and the Internet.
I’m going to have to say that an automatic dishwasher (I don’t count as a dishwasher) is a necessity in today’s life. Why should we have to do the manual labor when we have a machine to do it?