New Fridge, Same as the Old Fridge

Here is our old fridge, minus all the magnets and pictures we normally have cluttering it (but with the residue of unauthorized stickers).  We got this beauty Mar. 1, 2006, when I was 8 months pregnant with Anna, so it just turned 11 years old.  (I only know this because I happened to blog about the momentous occasion.  Otherwise, I just knew I was pregnant with someone, but that doesn't really narrow it down much, lol.)

It turns out that being 11 years old in refrigerator years is really geriatric, nowdays.  And our fridge was feeling its age.  I started noticing that ice cream didn't really stay frozen very well, so we just didn't keep it inside, but rather always put it in the garage freezer.  Then during basketball season, it seemed it could never keep up with the ice after people would fill up water bottles.  Gradually there was less and less ice.  Finally Bob put a thermometer in there are realized the temperature was fluctuating between 28 and 37 degrees.  No wonder it wasn't making ice or keeping ice cream cold!  I started buying a 20 pound bag of ice a week and pouring it into the reservoir.

I had it stuffed pretty full, so all my cooked chicken and ground beef were fine, because I guess they were keeping each other frozen, but we didn't think it would last too much longer.  Bob googled the problem and tried a number of different things (cleaning coils, turning it off and letting any possibly frozen tubes thaw, etc.) that were suggested, but nothing helped.

We wanted to find a new one before it was an emergency, so we started doing research.  I was excited--a chance to update and get a convenient french door one or something!  But as I researched, it seemed that pretty much every brand and model were "the worst on earth--never buy this one!"  Hmmm . . . that was not encouraging.  It also sounded like fridges were only really lasting 5-6 years, which was also alarming.

Eventually we narrowed down our options:  either a GE french door model that didn't have a water/ice dispenser in the door (because that seemed to be what frequently malfunctioned), or a Samsung one that did (that the McC's have and are happy with).  Bob and Christine pointed out that not having water and ice on the door would be quite inconvenient for us, since we still have so many young kids, and they are right, I'm sure.  The other one was more expensive, but we were looking at one that only Lowes sells, which had an ice maker in the door AND one in the bottom freezer part.  That seemed like the best of both worlds to me--but the drawback was that it was this weird slate color that seemed to be a top coating only.  It scratched super easy, and that didn't seem like it would work in our house, lol.  Verity would make short work of that!

So we were hemming and hawing around, having spent time at both Lowes and Home Depot (this was last Thursday night, the night before we left at 6:30 AM to drive up to CT).  Then Bob's eye was caught by a fridge in the clearance section.  It looked like the exact same refrigerator--Frigidaire side-by-side--that we have now, just 10 years newer, and with a few trim differences and no meat drawer.  The main attractive trait was the price--we could walk out the door paying around $650, instead of over $2000.  So that's waht we did.

You can compare for yourselves!  We got it delivered Monday afternoon, and I am happy to report that it is making ice, and keeping food frozen in the freezer side.  It is ugly and not well-designed, but it does work.  I like to think of it as like buying our big van--nothing had changed in the Ford Econoline vans since the 1970s, except for maybe a few extra cupholders.  And there have certainly been no improvements in this model in the past 10 years either.

In fact, the lack of a meat drawer was really a problem, and a definite deprovement, if that is even a word.  What we ended up doing was keeping all the shelves and drawers from the doors (because we've probably replaced each of them at least once, and repaired them all again with super glue, duct tape, and popsicle sticks, since they are apparently made of the cheapest plastic in the world).  We put the old meat drawer on the second shelf from the bottom, and then put one of our shelves from our old fridge right on top of it, so we didn't lose an entire shelf to the meat drawer.  It slides out, but it doesn't hang down on anything.  (It wasn't hanging down very well in our old fridge, since the tracks were broken . . .)  Now we have a skinny shelf for eggs and my box of spinach that I always have in there. 

I am not excited about this fridge, but I definitely felt like it was the best decision we could have made--the "adult" decision, lol.  Hopefully it will last 11 more years, and then *maybe* some brand of fridge will have distinguished themselves with exceptional reliability, like Toyota and Honda have done for cars.  I'm not holding my breath, though.  It seems like reliability is going in the wrong direction!