It was time to select the appliances. I am the first one to admit, I make reservations for dinner, rather than prepare food. The microwave is my essential appliance for reheating our left-overs from all those dinner reservations.

In this day and age, with the consolidation of the various manufactures, there are only about three different “real” manufacturers in operation, so you would think that the process of choosing appliance would be simple and quick.

Spend some time at an appliance store, and consider yourself overwhelmed. It took about a minute for me to become totally confused in my long favorite appliance store, Standard TV & Appliance.

Our sales person and my interior designer (Susan Green) were very focused on the coordination of this group of equipment. They all looked professional, but how about performance?

I ended up signing up for Consumer Reports to help me make sense of all the choices, options, features, and brands. The testing of Consumer’s Union is exacting, and quiet revealing, and led me back to my original conclusion that choosing a brand family is probably not the best way to go, though you might think so. The end product quality was different within the same brand, forcing me to choose outside of each brand family.

After much debate, internally and with my team, I ended up cherry picking from three different companies. I’ve picked a stainless steel finish, and I hope the grain of the stainless steel will match across the different appliance.

Again, I find myself dreaming of a web app that consolidates everything available about appliances in a single stop shop. I want to see reviews from home improvement stores, Amazon.com, Consumer Reports, and elsewhere all combined with clear images and feature descriptions and lists, along with a good comparison chart, to help me make these decisions. Instead, I have to gather all the information and, with the help of my team and the experts at Standard & Appliance, trust I know what I’m doing.

I’ve been doing this with clients for over 30 years. You would think it would get easier. It’s not.