We’re cooking everything we can. We have a tiny freezer and two ice-chests, so we’re putting things there.
For our fridge think not of a fridge with a six-pack of beer and a half packet of weiners. Nay! A) I’m a food-hoarder when it comes to ice boxes. I stuff the thing with everything that it will hold, and have probably 20 bottles of salad dressing. I don’t even like salads. And B) I’m a cook. I love to cook. On Atkins, all I get to cook is meat. Guess what the fridge is/was full of.
I hied me off to Lowe’s, source of fairly good deals, and our Lowe’s credit card enables 6 months of no-interest. Plus we had a 25.00 discount card. Jane—is supposedly getting some actual work done, which requires not just physical but emotional quiet and tranquility. So I proposed to go do it: I’m a pretty direct shopper: I go in with criteria—in this case, white is ok, certain dimensions ok, top freezer ok, icemaker is a must, and I want a good flexible shelf arrangement. I march past the salesfolk with “I’m here to buy a fridge,” and got a gal who’s helped us before. It was quickly down to 3, one side by side (too pricey, too little space), and one nubbly-surface sort and one smooth. “I’ll take curtain #2.”
“Well, if you wait a day, they’ll be on sale.”
Me: “I have a fridge melting in my kitchen.”
She: “I’ll see what I can do.” She marches off to talk to the manager. She comes back, says, “I can get you tomorrow’s sale price.” And then she goes off to find the fridge in stock.
Comes back. “I’m sorry. There isn’t one. There’s one due on the truck tonight.”
Me: “Do you believe that?”
She: “Usually.”
Me: “How about curtain #3?”
She: “I’ll check.”
She does. Finds out the one on the floor is the last and it’s not Energy Star compliant, which misses a 75.00 government rebate. She checks and finds out the new model is upstairs. It is Energy Star. She heads off to the manager to get me a sale price on a model not even on the floor yet, and, yes! I can get that one, get the sale price, and we’re good to go.
We got the paperwork filled out: (I omit the part at the front check-in where she had to come to the front and do it all again because their new computer system couldn’t find my item.) I get: my 25.00 general discount; the 75.00 Wa state rebate for replacing an older fridge with an Energy Star machine; 10% off [which is the sale], and generally got off with next year’s model at a very good price.
So…..
Meanwhile Jane instead of getting her work done had tackled what I thought I had to do: we have ton-‘o cooked meat. We will be creative with leftovers for a month. Tomorrow the new fridge will arrive. And we will NOT have had the old fridge totally malfunction and burn itself to a melted mass of stinking plastic, which is what they can do when they go into meltdown.
I took a page from my father’s book (he worked summers doing ice delivery in the old days, with a horse)and got a big ice block for the fridge as-is, which will keep the less-critical bottles of this and that ok; and two bags of ice for the two picnic boxes.
And this was supposed to be the quiet, tranquil day when souls would settle gently into place and creativity would happen.
We’ve had creativity, all right, but not on the work we wanted to do!
How nice to have a potential disaster work out so well! AND you are probably good for another 20 years!’ 😉
About four or five years ago our fidge went into meltdown, hot air blasting out when we opened the door, the works! We brought Proge’s little apt fridge in from the shed and then lucked out. Proge’s father and step-mother had just bought a new fridge, nothing wrong with the old one, would not fit into their new kitchen. They even talked the delivery guy into bringing it over to our house. (Needless to say a nice tip was in order.)
Why do these disasters always happen in summer? Although I suppose moving heavy equipment around in ice and snow would not be any fun either!
When we lived off the grid we used blocks of ice until we got our gas fridge.
Hope Jane managed to get some work done. {{{{hugs}}}}
Awwww!
That’s about the way I bought my last fridge, also from Lowe’s. Didn’t quite get that level of help, but a very helpful girl. And though I explained the limitations of the entrance lane at the farmhouse, that info didn’t make it to the delivery crew, or maybe they have only one size truck. Determining the drive wouldn’t admit the truck, they brought it on the hand-truck up a third of a mile of sandy lane!
I have had some poor experiences at Lowe’s, but some of their people are GOOD.
Ah, that’s creative, all right, but in a whole ‘nother area, les arts culinaires.
Congrats on getting discounts and bargaining well with the saleswoman. ‘Tis super.
I feel your pain. I had a fridge die, without ceremony and without bothering to give me its two weeks’ notice. Ordered a replacement. All was supposed to be wonderful, but despite measuring, it did not fit under my cabinets, so, had to have a handyman friend come and chop a couple of inches off the existing cabinetry to fit the new fridge in place.
It has only today dawned on me that, if I have the door reinstalled so it opens from the *other* side, I may not have the annoyance of moving the fridge over to get the one vegetable bin in and out. Hmm, if I offer one friend a little compensation, he might be able to switch the door’s hinge for me. (Better him than me, and better that I recognize this.) Why I didn’t have it done that way when it was moved in… hindsight is 20-20, foresight is myopic.
Best of luck with your new fridge, and keeping all those groceries cool meanwhile.
The only major appliance still not replaced? My washer and dryer. Hush, everyone, maybe they won’t hear me….
Well, Alls Well That Ends Well. And Happy Leftovers, which I happen to like. And now is the time to throw out all those old bottles of salad dressing.
the last time I was at Lows, I came back with a new dishwasher and a Nevada state discount like yours. The Mrs was ever so pleased to have a working dishwasher so she could quit that task herself.
Get a surge protect to plug in when switching the refrigerators. Small power surges can be deadly – more so on the modern ones which often have computer chips in them!
Yay! for the new refrigerator. Boo! for having the old one die before you were ready to replace it. Ours went much the same way 2 years ago; I resorted to keeping the milk and mayo in the freezer compartment, because that was the only part of the old fridge still staying chilly, and not at freezing, either. The small amount of frozen goods were packed into ice chests for the 3 days we were without a fridge, and we had to kiss the ice cream goodby. DH didn’t really object to having to eat steaks for those three days, however.
Congratulations on your new refrigerator and successful negotiation.
I wish my last experience in buying a fridge was as nice. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving two years ago. I was scheduled to fly to Wisconsin via Chicago Wednesday evening to spend the holiday with my parents & sibs – something I hadn’t done in 20+ years. Had a dinner party scheduled for Saturday and had done all the shopping so the fridge was full. Tuesday night…the water line in the freezer completely failed, water everywhere, and fried electronics. Ran to local 7Eleven and bought bags of ice. Wednesday, I used a vacation day and went shopping. No luck at Lowes or HD, so I went to the Sears Outlet. I definitely did not want a bottom mount with just a big drawer because I do a lot of frozen desserts in individual dishes for summer dinner parties. Nothing open on the floor that met my criteria but 6 pallets of refrigerators in the box in the back of the store…The salesperson was a nice, but obviously mentally & physically handicapped, young lady who was unable to answer most of my questions and was clearly parroting what she had been taught…”we do home delivery and take away the old fridge and we can deliver today” every time I opened the door of a fridge. Luckily, I had brought my own tape measure. Given that the clerk was holding down a job, I didn’t allow myself to be frustrated by her limitations. But the only fridge that looked like it would fit was in a box that had no description of the fridge. So I asked if the box could be opened. Answer: no. After several rounds of carefully explaining that I didn’t want to buy a fridge unseen, a manager (hereinafter Mr. Smirk) came out and asked her why she was spending so much time with me. I explained my need to examine the fridge before buying and what my needs were. No go on opening the box. Next level manager comes out …did I say I was the only customer in the store at the time?… tells first line manager to open the box for me. Mr. Smirk does so very ungraciously, young lady clerk nervously standing nearby afraid he’s going to yell at her…and the fridge has a bottom mount freezer. I tell him it won’t work for me. Now he’s really mad because the box is open. Second level manager comes over and says he’s leaving for lunch. In the meantime, more pallets are being unloaded into the store and there’s a Fisher & Pakel with a bottom mount freezer, but with pull-out shelves rather than a drawer and some cosmetic damage (mostly on the side that’s going to be against my wall) that’s the right size. A bit more than I wanted to pay but half off the usual price of a Fisher & Pakel. So I decide to take it.
Pay for the fridge on my credit card and told the delivery is a separate charge. No problem, says I. Oops, there’s a problem says clerk – we can’t deliver F&P products. Well a fridge isn’t going to fit into my Subaru, so I say, okay, cancel the sale. There’s a 10% re-stocking fee. Wait a minute, I haven’t even taken the fridge out of the store. She can only repeat about the restocking fee. Eventually she gets Mr. Smirk…. no, there’s a restocking fee (said with an unseemly amount of glee). This is ridiculous I say…one of the selling points was the home delivery and I wasn’t told this would not qualify before the purchase. Mr. Smirk wouldn’t back down, young lady clerk in tears at this point. Fine, I said…I am not paying a restocking fee (and I did need the fridge). So I asked for a phone book so I could find the closest UHAUL dealer. No phone books. No, can’t look up the number on the internet for you. Fine…walk out of store and drive down the hill to the local REI and they located the nearest UHAUL dealer, called them to confirm a small truck was available. Went and rented truck for $19.99…drove it to the Sear Outlet dock and asked to have the fridge loaded. They put the fridge in the truck. I ask them to tie it in – no they won’t do that for liability reasons. I ask for some of the rope they have. No, Mr. Smirk says, they can’t give me any rope. Well, I don’t want to be driving up & down the hills to my house with an untethered fridge. So I park the UHAUL, walk down to the REI, buy some rope and trudge back to the UHAUL. Successfully drove the UHAUL home; my neighbor and his sons helped me unload the fridge into my hallway. Fridge is supposed to run for 24 hours before loading with food and I have a plane to catch. My neighbor agrees to put the food in her fridge til Saturday but warns with 3 teenage boys there may be some pilferage. That’s a small price to pay say I….I return the UHAUL, drive home and then find I can’t get the fridge into the kitchen without removing doors, etc. So I park the fridge in the hall, catch my flight …. and swear off the Sears Outlet.
I have to admit that I *really* like this fridge…no water lines to break, good layout, and the three pull out shelves in the freezer means nothing every gets lost!
O-M-G. It’s a wonder you didn’t strangle them barehanded.
I have to admit that I was very close to committing some type of mayhem…but the young lady was so eager to please and I didn’t want to discourage her. Mr. Smirk, however…..let’s just say he better not run into me in a dark alley.
That, berylkit, is EPIC!
I recommend a shopping crew.
“I can get yee a crew Cappun’ they be a little rough around the edges
but hearty lads all.”
Their job is to say nothing, just hover nearby while you do your business.
Smooths the transactions with those who imagine authority immensely.
You can also have great fun with this.
I was with a friend and went to the restroom while he dealt with a business.
When I returned the young help scattered like chickens at the sight of a fox.
I asked him later what he had said to them. He had told them I was his bodyguard,
meanest one in the county….GRIN
Lol!
I will remember that, Tyr, very good tip! 😀
Having dealt with a nasty bout of food poisoning yesterday, PLEASE use caution with your food! It may be okay, but if you have any doubts, just throw it out. Trust me, it was a miserable experience.
I AM a believer. We are doing triage on the food. And I fear of all the cooked food we put away on ice—I think we forgot the pot with the chicken….it’s still on the stove.
Not *quite* a refrigerator story: I’ll never forget the first Thanksgiving prepared by my young, newly married aunt. She left the carcass out when we went to another relative’s house for (literally) a couple of hours.
When we walked back in her kitchen, the turkey was quite malodorous. We weren’t going to take any meat off of those bones!
Ewwww. Reminds me of the time my college roomie and I (pre-Jane: Holmes) bought a turkey we could ill afford off a pre-Thanksgiving megasale in the neighborhood grocery. It was 30 lbs. It was large, but we envisioned stocking our 1930’s style fridge with it and having meat until Easter.
We ran water over it and took out the packet, and stuffed it nicely (with raw stuffing) and began to cook it.
and cook it.
And cook it.
Supper on T-day, we thought it was done. We were doing fine until we tried to separate a drumstick and discovered ice still in the joint. We went Thanksgiving dinnerless and proceeded to cook it another 24 hours. By this time we had meat we could refrigerate, but a lot of it was still pink. We discarded that and the bones, and I have never, ever, ever been able to tolerate turkey in any guise…the smell permeated the house for weeks. And at Easter, before leaving for spring break, we disposed of the last of that ill-starred bird.
30 pounds?!? Even if it was 100% thawed, it would still have taken you more than a day to roast, going by most of the cooking charts I have. How long was that, altogether? I’m shocked it even fit into your oven; most college campus apartments I have lived in have tiny poorly functioning stoves that barely accommodate a healthy chicken.
eeeeewwwww indeed. not quite the same, but in 1978, when I and my (now ex)husband were rather hard up and having our first Christmas together we bought a mega turkey – too big for our pan, and it proceeded to overflow fat all over the oven – very smelly. at the same time I and a guest staying over the Christmas holiday had bigtime food poisoning from a batch of oysters eaten as part of a traditional French Christmas Eve meal with french friends. all but one of those who partook had full-blown shellfish food poisoning. result – I never want to see/smell never mind eat turkey again. (it was my husband who cooked it and was NOT ill)
Wow, I really lucked out. My college roommate had learned to cook from watching her stepmother, and my parents started teaching me to bake when I was four, and we swapped skills. We almost never had anything inedible. Although the time we mistook the confectioner’s sugar for flour and tried to make gravy out of it sticks in my mind…
Sweet gravy!;-) 😉 😉 snork!
I had a fridge stop working three days before Christmas, one week after I moved into my new condo. The fridge was full of new food and Christmas stuff, and I was panicking. I called around to various repair places, all of which said, “Sounds like a compressor problem,” and “You have that model/make? Those don’t have compressor problems,” until I got someone to come out to look at it. He said, “It’s a compressor problem. $600 will fix it.”
I decided to go new. Since it was three days before Christmas, though, and because there are terrific Boxing Day sales all over town on the day after, I figured on having to deal with no fridge. Except… bright idea! Could I rent one for that amount of time?
I could! It showed up that afternoon. They shifted the old one to an out-of-the-way space, said, “Merry Christmas!” as they left, and I filled the rental with the Christmas goodies I’d thought I’d have to eat, give away, or let spoil. It was an open contract on the rental, so when I went out to the sales, I was able to order the exact make/model I wanted, and wait the six weeks for it to be delivered. Moving day was do-si-doh with fridges; I had to arrange with the rental company to remove the rental before the new fridge was delivered (I may have space to temporarily store one fridge, but not two!) The old fridge was removed by the company delivering the new one.
Cost of the rental for a month and a half? About thirty bucks. Absolutely worth it, thinks I.
Brilliant!
Almost as bad as having a refrigerator go is leaving for a two week vacation (Shejicon II), and returning to an upright freezer that had packed it in while we were gone. The freezer is in our non-climate controlled garage in Arizona, during a hot summer. I opened the freezer to get something to fix for dinner, got a cascade of “fluids” and a lungful of decomp odors, and slammed the freezer door shut. I went right out, shopped at Lowe’s, Sears, and Home Depot. Made a selection, and had it delivered two weeks later (nobody delivers next day in our town). It was easier to keep the old one with more than three 65 gallon trash cans (dustbins) full of meat, ice cream, and frozen dinners) and throw a trash can at a time out (2 pick ups a week)and let the appliance delivery truck haul away the old one to “recycle.” I did tape it closed and put a bilogical contamination sign on the outside. They were warned…
Oh, glllluuggggh! I’m sorry you had such a homecoming!
Well, I can report I love the new fridge. It’s a Whirlpool, 20 or 21 cubic feet, and the nice thing is you can see through the bins, and the shelves are all totally adjustable. We put the spare (unmelted) ice in the freezer to help out the icemaker, which is already making ice.
It’s white, it’s a top-freezer model with a smooth (not nubbly) front face, and it’s (thanks to a good piece of luck) this year’s model instead of last (which was on the floor.) I can report it is very nice (Jane and I did severe triage on the clutter going back in) and I can go after things in nice organized bins and the like, where likes are with likes and I can see what I’m reaching for. Supper was the last of the emergency-cooked-up bacon in a spinach salad, and now we move on to other items.