I see we overlooked calizzy's question: "what about dishwashers?" What about them, indeed. Do you have a budget in mind? Buying used is taking the chances that wekick has outlined. Sometimes, it works out well and lasts a long time. Sometimes not. It really helps if you can do DIY repairs. For example, when I moved into my house 17 years ago, I bought a used GE dishwasher as a stopgap, When I got to the kitchen remodel four years later, I bought a new DW and sold the GE to a friend who is still using it and has never had to do any work on it. The replacement was a Bosch that lasted 12 years. The controller circuit board burned out. The part was no longer available (at least, it was not avialable any place I checked.) This happened on a holiday weekend with big sales. With the sales pricing that weekend, I got a new Bosch at a 40% discount, a price that was roughly $100 more than the prices for recent model used Bosch DWs on the Craigslist for my area. My concern with buying used DWs from an auction or from Craigslist or newspaper classified ads is that it is hard to know the history and hard to know anything about the sellers. I am more comfortable buying from a reputable dealer such as the the Habitat for Humanity "Re-Stores." There are two in my area, and both had good used DWs though all were older-model and low-end GEs, Whirlpools, Maytages and Frigidaires with heating coils and grinders. My personal preference is for condenser style drying (no worries about plastic) and filter drains rather than grinders (I once had to pick shards of glass out of a grinder). The models were older than the ones on CL that weekend, and so the prices were a bit lower. I decided that I preferred a new DW with a warranty and features I preferred over saving some up-front money. Had my budget had been tighter, I might well have chosen differently, bearing in mind the points that Wekick made. As for buying new, it seems that even low-end DW models (mostly) do a good job of cleaning dishes, at least according to the product testing by Consumer Reports. (Get a copy of the appliances edition to find the ones you want to avoid). The difference between inexpensive and more expensive is usually a matter of: (a) how long it takes to wash (inexpensive ones may take up to three hours for a load, while mid price ones like my Bosch SHE55M will do a heavy load in 95 minutes, a light load in 30 minutes); (b) how quiet the DW will be when running; (c) whether the tub interior is stainless steel or synthetic/plastic (a functional matter for condensing drying types, more an appearance/durability matter for those that use heating coils. (d) extra features (kinds of cycles, rack designs, number of racks, built-in water softeners, etc.) CR's January 2014 article on repairing versus replacing indicates that the DW brands with the best durability and reliability are Bosch, Miele and Whirlpool. The least durable and reliable DW brands have been LG and Samsung. CR's survey results suggest that dishwashers may last for a decade or more but about 20% of them will need repairs in the meantime and it is generally more economical to replace a dishwasher that fails in year 6 or later. Hope this info helps.

The comments about ten-power settings got me musing on the subject and about Amy's initial question about logarithmic power controls. Here's where that lead me. Nobody really has logarithmic power controls, but there can be power settings spaced to sort of approximate a logarithmic curve -- a number of settings at the low end with only a couple of additional points needed to define the steep side of the curve for really high heat. In theory, that can be done with a ten-step power curve and some folks do find 10 power settings fine for what and how they cook. Others do not. Is anybody else here old enough to remember the GE stoves and cooktops from 50's and 60's with ten mechanical pushbuttons for heat settings? Those pushbuttons were literally "digital" controls, meaning that you punched them with one of your digits. GE sold a lot of them for a couple of decades, so some people found them adequate. Some did not. For the current digital electronic ten-step controls, others here besides loonlakecamp have reported satisfaction with a ten step set-up. Others, like me, would find them inconvenient for my cooking with, say, my pressure cookers. With only ten heat level steps, I would have to be constantly switching settings to maintain the correct pressure. Power setting "1" might be too low, setting "2" might be too high. Switch to 1 for a while until the pressure drops a little too low, switch to 2 for a while until it gets a little too high, then back to 1, etc., etc. With in-between settings, I avoid that annoyance. You don't use pressure cookers? Then maybe having in-between steps won't matter to you. This is just one example of how cooking styles can differ and how more settings can matter to one cook and not to another. Much fuss is sometimes made about the supposedly infinite adjustablity of gas burners. As a practical matter, though, we mostly try to get the burner to the same relatively few settings. Searing is pretty much searing, isn't it? If you deep fat fry, how often would you care if if the oil were at 352° instead of 350°? But maybe somebody is working with sugar syrups where, say, it might matter if a syrup is at 325° and not 360° and then maybe it matters if the induction burner only has ten settings. That said, the subject of induction power settings and controls can be more complicated than just the number of settings. The need for finding "in-between" steps for induction cooking can reflect two different aspects of ways that manufacturers design induction burner controls. One consideration is the power cycling that all induction burners use for settings of less than full power. A technical term for this is "pulse width modulation. or "PWM." It is the same kind of thing a microwave does for low heat levels---momentary pulses of power that average out at a particular heat level. With most PICs as well as some brands of induction cooktops and ranges, the PWM is pretty crude. I've seen this somewhere described as firing up the burner for a second or two of omigosh hot and then switching totally off for three or four seconds. While these pulses average out at a certain heat level the timing can be problematic for, say, the srambled eggs that Amy mentioned at the outset. Combine that kind of "low frequency" PWM with the crude power controls found on many PICs, and you could have a reason that Amy would find herself wanting steps in-between power level "1" and "2" for scambling eggs. Some full size induction ranges and cooktops work this way. I noticed a lot of pulsing at the low heat settings on the Maytag induction range I saw demoed several years ago when I was stove shopping. From past threads on PWM, I gather than Whirlpool's induction ranges and cooktops (which include Maytag and Kitchenaid brands) have used crude PWM. For searching out past threads here on this subject try a search strings like "induction + pulsing + gardenweb" and "induction + cycling + gardenweb." A few of the expensive PICs (Cooktek, Garland, Vollrath) and many full size ranges and cooktops use much higher frequency PWM. Instead switching on and off for a second or more at time, the power switches on and off many times per second. The higher frequency of switching yields much finer power control that more closely approximates a steady heat level. The other design aspect that can lead to wanting "in-between" settings is in how the engineers program the electronic controllers to space the power settings on the appliance you are using --- that's the kind of logarithmic curve I thnk Amy may been thinking about when she posed her question in the original post. . For manufacturers, the least costly controls use simple linear spacing. Setting "1" would use the PWM to average 10% power, setting "2" would be 20%, etc. Even with a high quality PWM, though, 9 or 10 linear settings may be too crude, A thing most induction users discover pretty quickly is that they do most of their cooking in the low to medium range settings. The highest setting can be used for boiling. One or two medium high settings takes care of high heat applications like searing. There seem to be three strategies for induction manufacturers to address the crudeness. One is to add half-steps between the numbered power settings. The other is to program the stove's controllers to put more steps in the low to medium range and fewer in the high ranges. The third strategey combines the first two. Without using the particular induction stove or cooktop, it can be hard to find out whether the particular unit was designed to use one or the other or some combination of them. In my own somewhat limited experience, it seems that the GE induction appliances and Electrolux's Frigidaire/Kenmore ranges seemed to use a modified-half step approach with some concentration of steps but also using half steps for finer control. The Electrolux-branded models use a slightly different approach with quarter-steps at the lower power ends and fewer steps at the high end. Miele cooktops seem to use a similar kind of mix with the option of switching on more steps. I'm not sure how BSH (which includes Bosch) handles this except that their induction appliances manuals show that half-steps are available. The Samsung freeestanding induction ranges seemed to follow the GE model (19 half steps). The reports about Samsung's ten-step "Chef Collection" model seem to conflict, some seeming to say that stepping is linear, some hinting that the settings may be skewed to the lower end. There is a yet another strategy which is the near infinite stepping of of potentiometer-like controls. These control systems seem to be very expensive so, AFAIK, they are used only for the commercial Garland/Manitowiac PICS and maybe the new Miele induction range have this. I say "maybe" for the Miele because there is nothing about it in the product literature and the display shows only whole-number settings, but a couple of posters here -- livinginseattle is the name I recall -- have reported finding that the knobs can be turned to provide fine gradations of "in-between" settings. Some folks would find that ideal. Then the question becomes: how much are you willing to spend for the "ideal" (and are there other design compromises that have to accept in order to get that ideal function for the burners?)

Don't pick appliances because they're all from the same manufacturer! None of them do EVERYTHING equally well, IMHO. And re: Consumer Reports - be careful. Read the USER reviews too. Quite often, it seems the CR reviewers and the actual users are on two different planets - things CR rates highly get 1 or 2 stars from the users - repeatedly. This is not an isolated thing. Read as many reviews as you can all over the net, then go look at stuff. And if all that has died is the microwave and everything else is working fine, just replace the microwave. Microwaves aren't really considered repairable items these days and some of them barely make it to the end of the warranty. What you want is a microwave that performs well and meets YOUR needs. What do you want your microwave to do? How big, how much power, what settings, what interface - which can get really annoying if it's not to your liking! A few years ago, some idiot decided that microwaves with knobs for setting time (really???) instead of touch screen buttons were the way to go - and voila, practically all of them did that (what is this - 1975 all over again?) Thank goodness that bit of idiocy seems to be fading - but the point is, there are fads in appliance design too and you never know when one appliance is going to go toes up on you. The microwave is the least expensive item, and the one most likely to have to be replaced long before any other appliance. For that reason, I would never build a microwave in - if it dies and the line is no longer made, then what? Your cabinet may not be the right size for whatever you want to get next. Our microwave lives on an open shelf above the wall oven for this reason. Buy things based on your needs and wishes - not the wish of the store to sell you a whole bunch of appliances you weren't even considering before walking in. BTW - Kitchenaid calls some of their fridges "cabinet depth" and they are 30" deep. A counter depth fridge in my books shouldn't be much deeper than your cabinets - and most kitchen cabinets are 25" deep.

Thank you for the suggestions. To answer the questions asked - we wouldn't need any additional cars as we already have two. Anywhere we move would still be within public transportation distance of the city as that is important to me. However it would be longer and probably on a commuter train with less frequency rather than a bus as I have now. About the slightly smaller home - any homes that are around even the ones that are smaller than ours are atleast $500k more so I am in the same place where I wonder what the value is in moving (which was my original question) The architect I had mentioned came by today and had some great suggestions that we could use to make the area we already have way more functional for us as a family. I am thinking about doing those changes (which she said would cost about ($30K) which involve breaking down a wall and adding a couple more windows and one additional door. The windows and door would require condo approval but everything else should be relatively easy to do! She did mention that it would be difficult to add another bedroom to the upstairs as there is value in keeping that big room as it is for now without dividing it up!