Replacing our Clunker Refrigerator - the saga continues

Soon the moment of truth came when the refrigerator was delivered. The old refrigerator was moved out of our kitchen and into our garage so that it could be picked up by our utility company who was going to recycle it for us. Our utility company offered a small rebate for buying an energy star qualified refrigerator and another small rebate for having it recycled.

When the new refrigerator was slid into the open space of our old refrigerator we found out that it was a little wider and a little taller than our old refrigerator, but that it will fit with the removal of some of the "trim" on the bottom of the cabinet above the refrigerator. Well removing the "trim" was easier said than done since these cabinets are over 60 years old and are solid wood. It took several hours of chiseling and smoothing out and shaving off the heads of nails and such, but we careful removed enough of the "trim" without causing any real damage to the cabinet or leaving the cabinet unsupported.


The end result was worth it to us. We got a beautiful new side-by-side refrigerator with ice and water in the door, complete with a lock for the ice and water. That being said there is no way that a bigger refrigerator would ever fit in that space without removing cabinets so we will enjoy our version of a jumbo refrigerator and just feel spoiled as if this were the biggest refrigerator ever, because for us this is the biggest refrigerator ever to fit in this house.

Replacing our Clunker Refrigerator

It is kind of funny that we requested this refrigerator be left in the house when we bought it since shortly after we moved in the fridge started to leak. That left us mopping up our refrigerator. Of course mopping up a refrigerator isn't really something we wanted to keep doing so we looked to see what the cause might be and if it was something we could reasonably fix. Well it turns out this is a fairly common problem with this particular model of refrigerator and getting it fixed requires someone who knows what they are doing, in other words it's a costly repair. Well to us a costly repair on a 9 year old refrigerator that isn't very energy efficient to begin with just didn't make sense.

That left us to decide on a new refrigerator for our kitchen. That was not nearly as easy a task as you might think. Since we still have the original cabinets in our kitchen from 1948 we didn't have a huge opening for a new refrigerator to fit into. We carefully measured the existing refrigerator and looked online to find out what our options were going to be. In figuring out the right refrigerator we also had to decide what color we wanted to go with, we were deciding between another white fridge or going with stainless steel (or the metallic color).

This led us into thinking about what we want to do with the kitchen when we update it, this is probably several years down the road for us. We knew we wanted to go with a cottage style for the kitchen and to keep the old cabinets if at all possible. We also knew we didn't want a white counter top or floor. It took a lot of looking around and thinking to decide that gray would be the way to go for us. We are thinking a medium gray counter top and darker gray floor. Once this was decided we decided that maybe going with the more modern look of stainless steel would be our best bet as this would give the kitchen a more high-end professional look and would blend well with the gray counter tops and floor.

From there we narrowed our search down to see what we were left with as options. There wasn't a lot left. There were a number of top and bottom units and one side-by-side that we thought would fit the space without much if any chipping away at the cabinet above the refrigerator. When we went to the store the sales person told us that the same manufacturer made another brand and they were the same exact refrigerator other than the name. We were fine with that and then we were also told, when we asked about a lock on the in door water dispenser, that they had one and it was the same dimensions as the other one also. We were all settled on the new refrigerator now and happy with our decision. Then my paranoia set in that somehow this refrigerator wouldn't fit the opening.