The Saga of the Refrigerator: A Holiday Appliance Adventure

Well . . . it’s a good thing our fridge didn’t conk out in July! Why? Because in winter, an unheated sunporch can help take care of chilled foodstuffs that the downstairs “beverage fridge” cannot accommodate.

Meanwhile, here’s a pro tip: try not to need an unusual-size appliance during a pandemic-driven supply shortage.

Here’s the story. During the first week of November, we noticed the fridge was making an intermittent ugly buzzing sound like an electric razor. We hauled out the user manual (because we keep those kinds of things), and realized we were supposed to have periodically cleaned the coils (removing the fridge’s cardboard backing) as well as under the toe plate. So, we did both. They weren’t horribly bad, and we plugged the fridge back in, and it seemed to be fine. Yay! Whew!

Less than a week later, on November 10, the fridge was back to its ugly buzzing, and the stuff in the freezer was thawing out. We hustled stuff into the downstairs fridge and into ice chests and called a repairman. He made it out the next day, diagnosed a possible “oil restriction,” and said there appeared to be enough coolant that, if the restriction could resolve itself, which it seemed to be doing, the fridge might be fine. And so on. (He also fixed our elderly Kenmore dryer from the 1980s, which needed a new roller and was sounding like the jungle drums of the Cannonball Islands. But that’s another story.)

Well, the fridge held out for another week, then it started buzzing and not cooling again. I tried calling the repairman again (I left him a message), but this time he didn’t respond. Time to get a new fridge.

We’d gotten this refrigerator in August 2002, about a year after we bought the house. More on that in another post. But suffice it to say, “way” back in 2002, people were saying “Ohhhh, you know, refrigerators don’t last as long as they used to. They’ll last only about 15 years, you know.” (For perspective: my parents still have their General Electric fridge they’d gotten in 1965 when they moved into their house. But it’s their “second fridge,” now, and lives in their garage. But it’s running strong, and that’s the point. By the way, it’s made out of metal.) (But I digress.)

So our fridge is twenty years old, came with a fifteen-year life expectancy, so we should be satisfied. (Even though it looks perfectly good. It’s hard to wrap my mind around that. When cars wear out, they usually look tired!)

So on November 20, we went to Lowe’s (where we’d gotten our current fridge in ’02) to pick out a new one. Hopefully, we’d find one as much as possible as the old one. Why not? We got our money’s worth out of it. Guess what? Supply chain problems mean that the pickin’s are few. Here are our needs:

• It can’t be too big, because it needs to get in our front door, up a curving staircase, and fit into a rather small kitchen. Our current fridge, which measures 68 inches tall, 32.5 inches wide, and 28.5 inches deep (NOT including doors or feet), just barely made it up our stairs, with the doors off. It’s a 22.6 cubic foot capacity fridge, on the small side by today’s standards. A smaller fridge would really be okay with us (the purse analogy: the bigger the bag, the more unnecessary stuff you carry around).
• Side-by-side configuration: because our kitchen is small, smaller doors are optimal. Otherwise, it’s like, “Hey back up; I’m going to open the fridge.”
• We want an ice maker and dispenser, and preferably a water filter and dispenser. (Why? Because I like my ice, and even after two decades of NOT using ice cube trays, I’m STILL tired of using ice cube trays. I will forever be tired of using ice cube trays.) (And filtered water? Well . . . have you tasted Jeff City water? It’s salty.) Yet built-in ice and water dispensers are generally not available on small, budget, entry-level fridges. That are available in our region.
• Energy Star is a plus. White exterior a plus (we have a retro-1940s kitchen; but our only other big appliance in there is our white enamel vintage stove, and it’s not exactly a decorator kitchen . . .). But it’s a hard NO to black. I don’t want the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my kitchen. Stainless steel? . . . Okay, we can live with that. Whatever.

. . . It was depressing. I guess everyone in Middle America who can afford a fridge with an ice dispenser also has a huge-ass kitchen with acres of space for gigantic refrigerators, all on the ground floor, with enormous, handicap-accessible doorways throughout. Right?

But the salesman at Lowe’s did manage to find a limited number of a model very, very similar to our current one available in their warehouse, wherever that is. (Tennessee? Kansas City? Who knows; I can’t remember.) He encouraged us to snatch it up before they were sold. (Yeah, the ol’ pressure tactic.) But the price was good, eh? And it’s basically what we wanted. It was about the same size, even, which was reassuring, the more I thought about our staircase. It could be shipped to Jeff City in a few weeks.

So, okay! We bought it. We got a $100 discount for applying for (and receiving) a Lowe’s credit card. And we bought the extended warrantee. And we prepaid the delivery fee. Whatever. Let’s just get this done.

So, fast-forward to December 2, when the delivery was to occur. . . . But wait, no, let’s not forget Thanksgiving! Fortunately, the lack of a fridge in our kitchen was not the pain that it might have been, since Mom and Dad had ordered frozen honey-baked ham and turkey, and all the side items, so my contributions were minimal: wine, cranberry Jell-O salad, and a sweet potato pie (that I bought at the store).

Also in there, someone stole our recycling cart off our curb (WTF people??); and Sue had some serious troubles with her truck that got us actually looking around at used car lots, swallowing sticker shock, and starting to face the idea of having to replace it. What stupid planet was in retrograde, anyway!?

The night before the delivery, I performed what amounted to a ritual cleansing of the dead body. I pulled out all the glass shelves, the plastic door caddies, etc., and cleaned and dried it all.

I’m not sure why I did this; maybe a sense of pride? Don’t want the delivery guys to think we’re dirty housekeepers. But no—first, it wasn’t very dirty, anyway. But more, it was out of a sense of appreciation for the fridge. All the good years it gave us. We hosted lots of parties, many for our honored elders when we first got the house. Those were great days, and this fridge played a part.

And I’ve learned a lot about cooking here in this kitchen, here with this fridge as one of my assistants. Sauerbratens; all those Germanic Christmas cookies; Jell-O salads and other retro recipes; Indian dals, curries, sabjis; and so much more. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it had seemed like such a nice refrigerator when we got it; certainly the nicest I’d ever been in charge of, after years of renting apartments. It seemed to deserve more than being dumped out on the curb. It hadn’t betrayed me, you know? It was even kind enough to give us plenty of advance notice, though we’d kind of been in denial.

So, it was December 2, and the delivery guys arrived with their generic rental truck. The salesman had prepared us for this, but unfortunately it was worse than we’d expected. These young men weren’t ready to do anything more than roll the fridge into a big room, tear away the carton, plug it in, and leave. So they looked worriedly at our staircase, used their tape measurers, went back to their truck, came back, shook their heads, and asked if there was another entrance.

I showed them our back porch stairs, which are iffy in a different respect, and then I offered to unscrew the hand railings from the wall along front staircase. “No . . . no . . . too big. Sorry.” I told them in the simplest English words I could find that I’m glad they didn’t try to move it if they weren’t confident. So they drove away, and we never even saw that fridge. Sigh.

Meanwhile, Sue had disconnected the copper water line from the back of the fridge. Of course, she’d turned off the little valve for it under the kitchen sink, but as soon as she detached the line from the back of the fridge, we heard water running: the valve didn’t (and wouldn’t) shut off completely! This, naturally, happened minutes before the mover guys showed up, so we were coping with that while they were here with their tape measurers and their shaking heads (“no, no . . .”). Fortunately, buckets did the trick until our plumber showed up and fixed the leak. He showed up within an hour! (Wow, amazing! Something went right that day!)

So geez, now what. We called another appliance repairman, just to make sure there wasn’t something we could do to extend the life of our current fridge. Even if we had to pay $750 to replace the key mechanical components, maybe it’d be worth it, if it could buy us more years. Well, that guy came the next day, and as soon as we plugged it in, he could tell it was dead, D-E-D-dead.

Then we got a call from the appliance manager guy at Lowe’s. He let us know that the delivery guys had messed up and had gotten chewed out for their failed delivery. By golly, he said, Lowe’s was gonna make those guys deliver it! Oh, also, now the fridge has a dent on it, so they’ll take 15 percent off the price (remember, we’d paid back on November 20). Or, they could order us another one, if we want to wait again. . . . I told him I’d have to think about it.

Seriously, I wanted to find somewhere else. If the Lowe’s guy had told me that a manager would accompany the delivery guys this time, to make sure they did a good job, I might have said yes, but, um . . . no. The take-home point is, in 2021, Lowe’s won’t go to any efforts to deliver anything that might require extra care or work. They outsource deliveries to common laborers. They aren’t as good as professional movers, and they certainly aren’t installers!

So, a month after the trouble started, we were back to square one. Fortunately, we do have a fridge in our first-floor kitchen. That fridge, also bought from Lowe’s, is from April 2009; it’s a freezer-top model with an aftermarket ice maker (no dispenser); we’ve never connected it to a water source. It’s basically a beer-and-wine fridge, handy for when we’re entertaining, marinating sauerbratens, and so on. Even so, we’ve been forced to rely on my parents’ extra fridge for some of our frozen meats. (Oh, the irony: a 1965 fridge is showing up the appliances from the 2000s.)

So online I went. Maybe we should look for a smaller fridge, indeed. It seemed our choices were:

• Miniature, stylish-but-flimsy, juice-sucking fridges that would have seemed awesome for a few semesters in a dorm back when I was in college (but hardly worthy as a full-time appliance in a kitchen used by adults).
• Questionable, poorly rated, unknown/international brands that one only sees available online and are not carried by any reputable local dealers.
• Exceedingly expensive boutique refrigerators that are small and have all the features I want, plus many ridiculous gadgets I absolutely do not want, that are way above our price range. (Seriously, people, what the hell? You need a computer on your fridge, too?)
• And a variety of major brands fridges that, for some reason or another, seemed like a less-than-perfect fit, that were flat-out unavailable, or that (again) seemed much too expensive.

What the hell do people do when they live in big-city apartments and condos, where space is at a premium? Surely they’re not using college-kid fridges! Are they seriously buying $8,000 refrigerators? I finally started calling around local appliance stores.

I struck out plenty while I was talking to local appliance dealers, but apparently I had just enough luck when I called Columbia’s Downtown Appliance (where my parents get most of their appliances these days, and which still offers bona fide repair service, which is enormously reassuring to both my folks and me). First, lo and behold, they actually do now deliver to Jefferson City! This was not the case in 2002 when we approached them about buying a fridge then.

So, I read off my list of needs to salesman Eric, and by golly, he goes, “I have something like that, sure.” Whaaat?! Well, okay—it’s stainless steel, and it has trendy (and no doubt pricier) French doors with a drawer-style freezer at the bottom—but there it was: a General Electric that’s actually slightly smaller than our current one (which suits me fine), and has a built-in icemaker/dispenser and filtered water dispenser. I’ll be damned!

He found us a unicorn! At this point, the price, which was substantially higher than the Lowe’s option, didn’t seem like such a problem, since we were getting a major brand (with GE considered a more reliable brand than Frigidaire), with the features we wanted (more or less), and—AND—a genuine delivery and installation service.

Sign us up. Still, it did take us some thinking—for us, it’s breathtakingly expensive, and it won’t be available until “late January or early February” (pandemic-driven supply shortages, remember?)—but what were we going to do? So on December 5, we drove to Columbia, looked at some related/same vintage GE fridges, and put down half, with the rest due when the refrigerator arrives. The next day, we went to Lowe’s and got all the stuff about that purchase refunded to the new, otherwise unused Lowe’s card.

Sigh.

And this is how we navigated the holidays, down one refrigerator. We’ve made plenty of trips up and down the stairs, fetching things. It’s a real pain in the butt to think you’ve just retrieved everything for some dish you want to cook, then realize you forgot something. Like, the butter. It brings to life the “efficiency” topic prevalent in so many old cookbooks: “this well-planned floor layout saves time and steps!”

All the flours, nuts, seeds, and such that don’t technically need refrigeration, but benefit from coolness and don’t mind possibly freezing, are living in boxes on our sunporch. We still have stuff in the freezer at my parents’. We threw out a lot of stuff when we started having trouble back in November. We’ve been eating up a lot of the frozen food we might otherwise have kept longer. And we purchase ice for drinks (storing it in a cooler on the sunporch) and buy drinking water in gallon jugs.

And I realized I have a little “grazing” habit. More than once, I’ve found myself absentmindedly opening the fridge out of boredom and a vague sense of hunger. Oops! Oh yeah, it’s dead, duh. I started using it as storage space for club soda and stuff. Why not?

It’s amazing how much space it takes up, dominating the kitchen. Hopefully the new one will fit better overall.

And that, my friends, is my little Christmas story of the fridge. Basically boring, but the ongoing saga has occupied our thoughts and disturbed the processes of daily life, enough to deserve mention. Did we seem distracted, a little frazzled or frustrated this holiday season? This is one reason why.

Hopefully, in a few weeks, I’ll be able to post pictures of our glorious new refrigerator, and we’ll have plenty of reliable cold storage—just in time for our annual Valentine’s sushi meal!

Yeah—keep your fingers crossed!

Salute to the fridge

We bought it for $1009 from Lowe’s on August 19, 2002. The fridge was $797, plus $40 freight and delivery, plus about $120 for a five-year warranty, plus tax. For the record, it’s a Frigidaire FRS23R4AW8, 22.6 cu. ft. side-by-side refrigerator with built-in icemaker, water filter, and dispenser.