Farewell, Old Fridge

Our old refrigerator finally gave up after 20+ years of faithful service. It had been making a strange, loud noise for about 2 years, so it wasn't sudden or unexpected. I had been expecting its demise at anytime for the past couple years although my husband was of the opinion that the noise was just a vibration and nothing more serious. The old refrigerator served us well and it even had the decency to stop working when there was very little food inside. We had just returned from our vacation the night before and had pretty much eaten everything edible before we left.

We had been home for a couple hours when I noticed that it was no longer making the almost constant really loud noise that we had become accustomed to but was now making a different strange noise .

I said to the husband, "Have you noticed that the refrigerator has stopped making that loud noise? And, now it's making some other weird noise."

To which I received no response.

The next morning, I got up, went into the kitchen and opened up the freezer to get an English muffin. It was then that I noticed that there was water in the ice cube trays instead ice. A bad sign. I might or might not have said a bad word. I decided that the best response was to just go back to bed.

We were leaving again the next day, so I put off shopping for a replacement until this week and the new one was delivered today.

I haven't talked much about our house yet, but it is a small (under 1,000 square feet) cottage that was built around 1929. The size of the kitchen and the placement of the kitchen cabinets, as well as the size of the entry doors to the house really limited the available choices for a replacement fridge.

The old refrigerator and all of the other appliances are white, so I wanted to stick with white and that narrowed down my options even further because so many models were only available in stainless steel. Stainless steel is so popular and I have nothing against. If I was doing a whole kitchen I would likely choose it. My frugal ways prevent me from even considering replacing appliances that are still working and I want all the appliances to match so I'm sticking with white.

The other thing that really eliminated a lot of choices was the height that would fit under the existing cabinet. Evidently, refrigerators have been growing taller over the past 20 years and many would not fit under what was once a standard-height cabinet.

I ended up with a Whirlpool from Lowe's. It was on sale (not sure how often appliances are on sale but I felt lucky that both Lowe's and Home Depot had them on sale the very week I was shopping for one)  and there was free delivery and they took the old refrigerator for no extra charge (not sure if they always do this but it was great).

It's a pretty basic model but it fit through our front door and it fits in our kitchen and it should meet our needs, which are pretty simple--cold food, ice. Four days of living out of a cooler and shopping for groceries and ice every afternoon were enough. Glad to have all the modern conveniences again. So here it is in a quick cell phone photo, making the kitchen cabinets look decidedly less white.