Replacing single oven with a Double Oven (Sugar Land, Howe: fit in, house)

[bobby71]

I live in a 20-yr-old house in Sugar Land, and have just inherited a Thermador electric Double Oven from my brother-in-law, as he's doing a remodel on his much-nicer house.
Our kitchen currently has a single oven (original, 20yr old) with a microwave above it. So it's 2 openings in that cabinet. By the looks of the installation manual on the new oven, the opening in my current cabinet needs to be expanded. However, there doesn't seem to be enough space vertically, as the larger opening would extend into the area of the cabinet drawer that's below the current oven.

I imagine I could get by using a local carpenter to figure out a way, possibly even creating a custom cabinet to fit?

Has anyone upgraded from a single to a double oven and had to deal with something like this?

Thanks for any information you can pass along!

[carryyourbooks]

you will have to add an additional oven circuit, won't you? if so, its probably minimum 30 amp 240 volt.

[astrohip]

Some things to consider:

* Measure the overall size of the Thermador. If it will fit in your current cabinet, then you can hire a trim carpenter to rebuild it for you. It's relatively easy to take out doors/drawers and rebuild. However, if it's too WIDE to fit, you're SOL.

* Check your circuit. cyb is correct in that you may have a smaller circuit than the Thermador requires. For example, a double over, both self-clean, may draw 30-40 amps. A single may only take a 20 amp circuit. You can do this yourself; go to your elec panel, see what's labeled "oven", and see how many amps it is. Then see what the TDor requires.

* Some older TDor ovens were venting. Like a hood. They did this to exhaust the heat outside, esp during the self-clean cycle, and not dump it back in the kitchen. Depending on how old this oven is, it may or may not require venting. If it does, it HAS to be vented. If not, ignore this part.

Now, out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? You have an oven, and you have a MW. You will end up with a double oven, and no MW. You can always put a MW on the counter, but then you lose valuable counter space. Unless you are a heavy cooker and truly need the two ovens.

Final thought: If you are doing this because you think the TDor oven will make your home nicer come sell-time, I would say no. TDor no longer has the super cachet name it had twenty years ago. Still a great product, but in terms of branding, it's been passed by Viking, Wolfe, Monogram and others.

[bobby71]

First off, my apologies for not having returned to this thread. I thought I had my settings to notify me of responses, but I didn't get any emails until this weekend. I thought it was odd that such a seemingly friendly forum didn't have any responses at all. I now know I was wrong

Well, as an update, I ended up having a carpenter remove the shelf separating the mw and oven, and lowered the bottom shelf, so that the double oven would fit. It fits nicely, and I now have a double oven in the kitchen. Luckily, the oven had it's own dedicated 40amp circuit, so I didn't have to do any rewiring.

As for the reasoning behind doing it, although TDor doesn't have the cachet it may have once had, I'm not so sure having a double oven would hurt the value of the home, come sell-time. And if I could replace the 20 yr old single oven with a much newer double oven (regardless of brand) for free - I'm still ahead of the game. True, the MW is currently taking up some counter space, but I'm leaning towards installing it at one end of the island, to get it off the counter.
Thanks for all the responses, and sorry for my failure to get back to you guys.

btw, funny you mention Wolfe, that's what he's replacing the old TDor with! Very nice stuff.