We are coffee drinkers. We drink Starbucks dark roast beans, lovingly ground the night before and nestled into a dry, crisp filter in our pre-programmed coffeemaker, set to brew a perfect pot just minutes before our alarm goes off. If I wake up and there is no coffee waiting, it is excruciatingly difficult for me to blunder my way through the coffee making process. I know this is ridiculous, but that is simply the way it is.

Enter Husband. He is a person who does not like to part with things. He is one of those “this might come in handy sometime” people. So when our last coffeemaker’s heating element died, he gently cleaned it, packaged it up in the original box (yes, he kept that too, just in case), and put it out in the garage. And when our exact coffeemaker showed up on sale, he quietly bought one because that is what sane people do, buy back-up coffeemakers and store them in their garages.

Our current and long standing coffeemaker, a steady and trustworthy workhorse, quickly lost it’s external beauty. It started with a crack and quickly turned into the loss of the entire face plate. I would be lying if I told you this did not bother me at all. Totally superficial of me, I know. I noted the unkempt look a time or two but really thought nothing much of it. The coffeemaker made coffee, so what if it looked industrial-punk and the buttons sometimes threatened to tilt wildly to the point of detachment. It’s not like we are having company over or anything.

Enter Husband, again. The old coffeemaker came in from the garage, boxed in its original packaging. The thought was to simply pop off the face plate of the non-working one, and put it on the workhorse coffeemaker. But the face plate did not pop, it did not want to come off at all.

Undeterred, Husband proceeded to perform a multi-organ transplant, removing the bad  heating element and all the parts and pieces that went along with it and replaced it with all the inner workings from the coffeemaker with the missing face plate. This was very stressful because what if something went wrong? Would we have to use our back-up coffeemaker thereby no longer having a back-up coffeemaker? You could imagine the stress. But there was no need to worry.

We now have a new looking coffeemaker, Frankensteined together from the workings of two machines. Husband gave Frankenstein a couple vinegar-water transfusions and then make a pot of coffee.

Perfect cup of coffee made in a pretty coffeemaker.

And as a bonus, the back-up coffeemaker is still in the garage waiting.