Named for the mountains on the horizon.
The Sawtooths are the range every Idahoan points to, and on a clear winter morning you can see them from the Foothills above the shop. Sawtooth Appliance Service runs from 12673 W Ashcreek St, off Five Mile Road near Ustick, which is about as central as the Treasure Valley gets: Meridian and Garden City in ten minutes, Eagle and the Bench in twelve, downtown, the North End and Northwest Boise in fifteen, Star in eighteen, Nampa, Kuna and Southeast Boise in twenty, and Caldwell and Middleton at the thirty-minute edge of the map.
This valley is a particular place to fix appliances in. The water is hard almost everywhere — city or well — and scale is behind half the dishwasher, ice-maker and washer calls we take. Garages drop below freezing in the January inversion and pass a hundred degrees in July, and the refrigerators and freezers in them quit in both seasons. Dust off the fields and the construction sites packs dryer vents and condenser coils. And the subdivisions in Meridian, Kuna, Star and Nampa were built in waves, so their builder-grade packages fail in waves. We built the company for exactly that.
What we chose not to be
We do not chase every appliance ever made. Six machines — washers, dryers, refrigerators and freezers, the stove-range-oven stack, dishwashers and the ice makers inside refrigerators — get all of our training time and all of the room on the truck. Microwaves, wine coolers, standalone ice machines, water softeners and commercial kitchen gear are not on the list, and when a call falls outside our lane we say so before anyone pays for a visit.
The rules we run on
- $99 diagnostic anywhere within 30 minutes of the shop — inside every approved repair
- One written number before work starts; the same number when it is done
- No distance, gate or Saturday surcharge; no second trip fee
- All pricing after the diagnostic, in writing — nothing guessed over the phone
- Written warranty on every completed job
- Honest advice when a machine is not worth fixing — $99 is the whole bill and you keep the answer
The valley, from the truck
Scaled inlet valves in Meridian, a shop freezer thawing in a Kuna garage in January, a Sub-Zero on a well in Eagle, a 1962 basement laundry on the Bench, forty feet of attic vent in a two-story in Star, wildfire smoke on a condenser coil in August — these are not footnotes here, they are half the diagnosis. The truck is stocked for the faults this valley actually produces.
