Kitchen Difficulties

Our Fridge Is Possessed…


Anyone know a good Exorcist?

I’ve been wrestling with our kitchen fridge for the past month or so, and it’s been winning each round of the fight.

The fridge and I have sort of a “love hate” relationship…I love to hate our refrigerator.

I guess it’s not surprising that we’d have trouble with it because it would appear that it is pretty old and that the gentleman that rented us the condo probably took his good fridge with him when he moved out.

I don’t know if he bought this one at a used appliance shop or found it sitting beside the road or in the dump, but I’m 99% sure that old man Schwaller (our original landlord) didn’t keep his food in this beautiful piece of plastic and steel and chrome.

It has a crappy amateur spray paint job on part of it, rust on other parts of the cabinet, and it has generally looked like heck from the very beginning of our tenancy, but we’ve gotten by with it because we didn’t own the place and didn’t want to put the money into buying our own unit.

At first it was the ice maker that made us crazy.

Ever since we moved in it has made hollow ice cubes. There’s no adjustment or other control on the unit, and I guess that hollow cubes wasn’t really a big deal except that a cooler full of hollow cubes doesn’t have the same cooling value as a cooler full of solid ice cubes.

We’ve elected to just live with it anyway.

Next the icemaker started taking what we called random “vacations.”

When we had visitors or otherwise needed it the most, it would just stop making ice. I would then go out and buy bags of ice, and almost every time the machine would start producing its own ice again in a fit of jealousy or something.

Most recently the icemaker stopped putting the water into its ice tray and started dumping it down the back of the inside of the fridge into the bottom of the freezer section and ultimately out into a puddle on the kitchen floor.

At that point I took the irritating thing (the icemaker) apart, fiddled and fumbled around with the pieces, then put it all back together again. I even managed to not have any screws or other parts left over when I was done.

I couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it, but guess what?

It worked…

For exactly one day.

Once I had prematurely declared victory, then it went back to dumping water on the floor.

I simply turned the blasted thing off and I have been buying ice ever since.

This week the feces hit the proverbial fan when Pat took a swig of 1% milk that was less than a week old and nearly spewed it on the ceiling.

The milk was sour, as was the other half gallon of whole milk (my beverage of choice.) I’ve been afraid to check the half and half and whipping cream, but I think that they’ve succumbed to the same fate.

It was at that time that we realized that our old friend and my nemesis, “Mr. Fridge,” was dying.

I, personally, didn’t know whether to celebrate or cry, but I finally called the landlord yesterday morning to report our difficulties.

The dentist that is our current landlord bought the condo the month we moved into it. In retrospect we missed an awesome real estate deal here, but we didn’t realize what we were looking at, being unfamiliar with St. Simons island property values when we arrived.

Any way…

The Doc came over twice within a couple hours of our phone call yesterday and by noon he had a nice new side by side fridge on the way...

AND HE RAISED OUR RENT $50 A MONTH to pay for it.

Gosh darn it, WE could have bought a new fridge for $50 a month ($1200 in two years) and owned the darn thing when it was all said and done.

Well, at least we don’t own the condo or the new fridge when it blows away in a hurricane this summer.

It would appear that by raising our rent $600 per year, my old nemesis “Mr. Fridge” got in one final parting shot as he goes out the front door this morning.

I think that I’ll give “Mr. Fridge” a nice kick in the door once it is safely outside the building…