Death of a fridge

Our apartment building is less than 18 months away from celebrating the 20th anniversary of its construction. As I've mentioned in earlier blog posts the building is now in midst of its first major repainting and facade repair program.  Garry and I are also less than four months away from celebrating the 15th anniversary of our purchase of the apartment itself.  At the time, moving in drove a host of supplementary spending on furniture and appliances.

As the years tick by, it's been interesting to witness one appliance after another slowly giving up the ghost.  In the last three years we've had to replace the dishwasher, the oven, the microwave, the coffee machine, the laundry dryer and our back-up laundry fridge (also know as the beer and wine cellar).  We've reached the point where only our main kitchen fridge and plasma TV are still original purchases.

However, last month, our kitchen fridge finally called it a day.  Thank goodness we had the back-up downstairs.  I'd noticed a few months earlier that the fridge was starting to cycle through its cooling function more frequently.  At the time we thought it was on its way out but decided we'd wait until the new year.  Our optimism proved misguided.

Needless to say, a flurry of frantic unpacking and repacking saw us filling our "wine and beer" fridge with fresh and frozen goods from the kitchen.  We then spent weeks searching for a suitable replacement. Frustratingly, the search is always compounded by the entrance door to our apartment.  In a moment of madness, the architect who designed our building failed to install over-size doors.  As a result, we're forever measuring furniture and appliances to ensure they'll fit.

Garry and I have talked about a fridge with French Doors for some time so we duly traped the halls of every appliance store in the area looking for the perfect model.  We decided not to spend more than absolutely necessary as we still harbour aspirations to renovate in the future and thus replace the appliances to match the new look.

As luck would have it we came across an end-of-line model marked down as the last in-store and couldn't resist the bargain.  Much to our surprise; the new fridge ultimately cost $500 less than the model it replaced (despite the passage of 14 years).