Simply Salas: Farewell to our friend the refrigerator

Yes, after 23 years of service, our faithful friend the refrigerator finally gave out. We had a few clues that his time was coming over the last couple of months but we chose to ignore those signs; after all, with 23 years of service, who could imagine an end to our great relationship of leftovers and prime magnetic memo space. The first clue that his time was near was when the door fell off in Debra’s hand. It happened while I was at work so all I could do in reply to Debra’s panicked phone call was to tell her to put the door back in place and let the magnetic seals hold it there until I could get home. It was a close call but with a few moments in the operating room (commonly called the magic garage) the refrigerator was back in service with a rebuilt hinge. The next clue was when the water valve died. We couldn’t last long without our ice and chilled water so it was back to the operating room for a new solenoid valve. The final clue that the end was near was when I went to get some frozen waffles for breakfast and I noticed water dripping out the freezer door. Yes, the freezer was no longer freezing and the ice and everything else that should have been frozen was melting.

Well of course this story will have a happy ending, but the ending isn't here yet. You see, because we had the refrigerator so long, the size of refrigerators grew and when we went shopping for a new refrigerator, we quickly found out that opening for the refrigerator in our custom built cabinets was too small for the new larger refrigerators.

In order to install our new refrigerator I had to rip out some of our cabinets and will have to build new ones. As long as we don’t have any other disasters, hopefully by next summer I can have the cabinets rebuilt and all will be back as it once was with the one sad exception – stainless steel refrigerators don’t hold magnets