#middle aged problems

deputychairman said:  Very interested in comparative fridge prices! Did you get a fairly-fancy one, or is that price quite standard? Bc when we had to replace ours 6 ish years ago it was more like €500 and sure you can always spend more but I just couldn’t think of anything extra a fridge could do that mine doesn’t (it’s a box that’s cold! What else do people want from it???) to justify the extra. Having said that, an ice maker is an unheard of luxury here but I can see it would be rather nice!                 

Soo.... around here you can get a cheapish fridge, from $500-1000, which has the fridge on the bottom, the freezer on top with a separate door, and may or may not have a plumbed-in icemaker in the freezer. Those are optional, you can still get ones without.

A step up, you can get ones with the freezer on the bottom, which is great in terms of ergonomics, and generally lets you store more stuff in there. (Having the freezer drawer pull out is enormously useful at letting you pile things into it and yet not lose track of what’s down there.) It is impossible to find one of these that does not have an ice maker built in; you don’t have to hook them up, and much of the time people don’t-- my mom has one of these and just literally could not run water to it given the layout of her kitchen, so she just keeps her ice cube trays in the ice machine bit, and it works fine. These also can have either the normal swinging door or French doors; we got one with French doors because it’s slightly more energy-efficient and ergonomic and fits our kitchen better. These are around $1,000-$5,000 depending largely on features that seem somewhat opaque to me, some of which include size, and my smallish doorways constrained me on that one a fair bit, but also the fact that it’s just the two of us so we don’t need a fridge we can fit a whole hog carcass into. Many, but not all, of these will have a dispenser set into the door, so that you can dispense ice from the machine straight into your cup, or dispense chilled water into a cup.

Somewhere in here are side-by-side fridges, where the freezer and fridge are next to one another vertically. That, to me, seems the least space-efficient option, but Dude’s mom has one and likes it quite a bit. Hers has the water dispenser in the door, and that broke after... well, Dude’s dad installed it, and he died in ‘03, so it did have a pretty good run. Fridge still works fine, though.

More expensive fridges will additionally have like... smart fridge shit. Ours has a sticker that tells us there’s an app we can get, but the app doesn’t actually interface with the fridge in any way, which is what I want-- dumb fridge only please I do not want my fridge to be part of a bot army DDOS’ing the Dept of Defense. Thanks!

I sort of pouted that I couldn’t get one without an ice machine-- it takes up space!!-- and said if we had the machine we were gonna hook it up, so we are. $150 to hook it up and probably it will break, but listen, I can keep the empty ice cube trays in my pantry closet in the basement until it breaks and enjoy the bougie while it lasts.

anelith51 said: This gives me hope that our fridge (ordered in November) might show up soon!

Ha I hope so!!! Good luck!!!