When we bought the house last July, Holly and I knew that the fridge that came with it wasn’t long for this world. Every time the compressor on it wound down, it made a horrible thud - as if it were a 64.5-year-old factory worker plopping down on the recliner after another hard day’s work, just waiting for the moment when it could finally retire for good. Given the price of a new fridge, however, and all of the money we were spending elsewhere, we decided to ride it out until it died - since, after all, it was still serviceable in the meantime.
Unfortunately, the Saturday before last was its time.
We came home from our stained glass class (writeup coming on that shortly) around 2:00, and when we arrived back at the house, I headed for the fridge to find something to eat. The second I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I knew the fridge was dying - it was making a horrible, rapid-fire thud-thud-thud-thud-thud… noise, with metal obviously bending and warping with every thud. I called Holly over, told her we needed a new fridge, and the second she heard it, she agreed, and we headed off to Lowe’s.
Those who’ve read this blog for a while may wonder why we went there, and not good ol’ Home Depot. The answer is simple: while Lowe’s is more annoying to get to, we’ve found that their selection is better, their prices are lower, and their customer service is friendlier. Since a few extra minutes to get to the store didn’t matter much on a major appliance purchase, we decided to give them the money instead of those douchebags at the Home Depot.
The good news, in terms of shopping for a fridge on a must-buy-now sort of a basis, is that Holly had dragged me through the refrigerator section of every single stinking home improvement store we’d been to at least twice over the past year, so we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted. Within about an hour, we settled on the Samsung RF267ABRS, a 26 cubic-foot model complete with built-in filtered water/ice, chiller drawers with humidity control, digital temperature control, and - most interesting of all - a freezer on the bottom. This last feature makes a lot more sense than you might first think - since cold air falls, it’s more energy-efficient, and it also means that you’re not bending over to get to items in the fridge, which you access much more frequently than those in the freezer.
While we were there, we picked up a Samsung DMR78AHS dishwasher, to replace the 80’s vintage model we currently own (it’s quite literally the exact same model as the one that came with my parents’ house that was newly built in 1985). While the existing dishwasher still works, it doesn’t exactly do a great job, it’s obnoxiously loud (to Holly’s ears, anyway), and, like everything else that came with the house, I’m concerned it’ll die a horrible death at any minute. Since we got a $200 rebate for buying the two appliances together, it just made sense to go ahead and spend the money - especially since we also got 10% on the first purchase on our new Lowe’s card (which will hold the balance of the purchase for precisely the length of the six-month no interest, no payments deal we got).
With delivery scheduled for the next morning, we came home, and decided to start the world’s fastest kitchen renovation - seeing as how we’d already have the fridge moved out, we figured we might as well get it done while we were at it.
The first matter of business was measuring out the space our existing fridge sat in - while we’d taken a measurement of the fridge itself, we’d not expected to have a new one be quite so much larger, and we were hoping that we could just squeak in to the existing space. Of course, we weren’t so lucky - the new fridge, which is essentially the new standard size for refrigerators, was about an inch wider than the space we had. Given that we’re looking at redoing the cabinetry in the kitchen in the next year or two, we decided to just rip out what was sitting in the way…and in so doing, were treated to a spectacular display I like to call “Ugly Wallpaper Throughout The Decades”:
It’s almost as if we’re the first people with any kind of taste to ever own this house. How could you love any of those patterns? More importantly, how could you just leave them up, after that many kitchen remodels?
With those photos taken, we went ahead and moved the dying fridge out from the wall, so we could begin the process of stripping the last of the wallpaper from the room before painting. In the process, we discovered what may be the single most horrifying piece of electrical jimmy-rigging I’ve ever run across:
As Holly’s uncle pointed out while visiting this weekend, that’s actually paper tape around that wire join, not electrical tape. Given that the whole thing was pushed up against the wall - and that the wiring job was so bad that it zapped me every time I looked at it funny - it’s amazing it didn’t burn the house down years ago. Like my mother very aptly said, who the hell thought it was a good idea to hotwire a fridge?
Naturally, things got even worse once we got the wallpaper stripped. I’ve seen mold in kitchens before; it happens in hard-to-reach places, even with the cleanest of people. What I’ve never seen, though, is huge, multiple square foot-wide hunks of mold, clinging to the wall underneath rotted out, decades-old wallpaper. I think the only reason Holly and I didn’t die a horrible death breathing the stuff over the last year is that the paper kept it mostly in check - which, unfortunately, was no longer the case once we ripped it off.
The good news is, mold has a natural enemy that we’re quite friendly with: bleach.
It was spectacular watching the walls turn from black and brown to white, all in a matter of seconds. Yeah, sure, we coughed a bit as we sprayed the bleach on the whole thing…but I guarantee we’ll be breathing better with that mold gone.
Working until well past midnight, we got the last of the wallpaper stripped, and the area behind the fridge primed with Kilz anti-mold primer. I set the alarm for 6 a.m., so that we could get up, slap on a coat of the sealant we’d recently used in the basement (which dries within a half-hour), and then paint, all before the delivery driver arrived - supposedly around noon.
When I called the delivery department at 8:00 a.m., as instructed by our salesperson, we ran into a snag: apparently we’d missed the cutoff for next-day delivery when we purchased, and the delivery trucks had already left the store (it turns out that the delivery manager arrives at 4:00 a.m. to start putting things together). While sympathetic to our plight - we were concerned that our fridge would die at any minute, taking everything inside with it - his drivers ran into other snags during the day that prevented him from having them get us the fridge on Sunday.
In the end, though, that ended up being a good thing: not only did it give us time to paint the entire kitchen before the fridge arrived (the dishwasher is still on back order), it meant that we got free installation on Monday morning, at 8:00 a.m. sharp. The delivery drivers hauled away our old fridge, and soon we had the beautiful new unit all set up and running:
Since then, we’ve installed new trim throughout, and replaced the knobs on our cabinets with free oil-rubbed bronze units Holly’s mother gave us (she got a ton of spares from an eBay auction she’d won). The kitchen looks amazingly better:
What’s really impressed me the most, though, is the fridge. The water and ice that come out of it are amazingly delicious - good enough that we can basically quit buying bottled water, which should save us a grundle of cash over the life of the fridge. The freezer-on-bottom concept is working much nicer than I expected, and the movable shelves inside the fridge are already proving useful. Surprisingly enough, though, it’s the humidity-controlled crisper drawers that are its best feature. While the Samsung rep at Lowe’s talked them up to no end, I figured it was just a marketing gig, and would leave my food soggy if anything. The reality, though, is that it, too, will save us money: I put in a half a bell pepper and a half an onion nearly a week ago after making some salsa, and they’re still fresh and crisp as I write this, as opposed to the wilted, close to mildewy state I would have expected in the old fridge. Even the celery I bought the day the fridge arrived is nice and fresh. With that sort of lifetime on fresh fruits and vegetables, we’ll be able to keep from throwing out a lot of good food - which, at the end of the day, is money in our pockets.
Was a major kitchen remodel conducted over the span of four days crazy? Yup. Did we spend a ton of cash on new appliances? Sure. But with the money we’ll save on electricity, water, and food, and all of the new features we get in the meantime - man, was it worth it!