Last week, our fridge started making a very loud sound and never stopped. As we've had to make several maintenance requests in the last couple of weeks and the fridge was still cooling, we let it go for a day. By Tuesday, I realized that the landlord should probably know in case the situation got worse. Which it did by Wednesday afternoon. By the time a repairman came on Thursday, the fridge was at 53 degrees and the freezer was at 41 degrees. (Will and I had a highly education discussion on necessary conditions for water to stay frozen...I just wish he wouldn't have constantly been asking me questions while I was trying to salvage as much of our freezer contents as possible. #homeschool) By Friday morning, we walked in a silent kitchen. The fridge was completely dead and the temperature on the inside by Saturday felt almost warmer than room temperature. And it feels weird to open a refrigerator door and not be blasted by cool air.
Fortunately for the owner...not so much for us...the refrigerator should be under warranty. However, the earliest that someone from the company (that the repairman did not work for) could come out was July 13th. At first this didn't seem like a huge deal. Just a bit of an inconvenience. Which leads to my list of cons:
1. No ice. The kids and I love ice in our drinks. We drink ice water constantly. The fact it is the middle of the summer only adds to the terrible situation we found ourselves in on Friday. It was hot, the water out of the tap is lukewarm at its coolest. I'm pretty sure the fact I didn't drink much of anything that day has led to a sore throat. I am literally parched! Eric did buy some ice on Saturday morning to keep milk cool and we've resupplied it each morning since. This is fine, but getting ice out of those bags for a drink is really hard when it is all melted together. Not to mention, the discomfort from handling ice for longer than you intend to as you try to break it apart. That one surprised me a bit. Oh, and the fact our first cooler leaked the melted ice water. Poor John slipped twice before we realized what was going on.
2. No cold milk. Ever drink room temperature milk? I rest my case. In order to have cold milk we have to buy the lower capacity quantities so that we can drink it all in a day or so. Depressing for this cheapskate.
3. Every time I want anything, I need to go to the mini-fridge in the screened-in porch. Not such a big deal, unless I'm attempting to avoid a certain 1-year-old who cries and begs to be held as soon as he sees me. Which then makes meal prep a little harder.
4. Loss of food that just didn't make the priority list. This included leftover spaghetti sauce/pesto/macaroni and cheese and some vegetables (that may have been on their way out anyway...but, the loss of cooling definitely pushed them over the edge). There is some lunch meat we kept...but, we may be pressing our luck with that.
5. Loss of use of the beer/soda fridge in order to salvage the massive amounts of dairy products I had recently purchased in my monthly grocery shopping trip. See reason 1, and this becomes even more of a hardship. And on 4th of July no less!
However, after a day of dealing/not really dealing with not having a fridge, we put our critical thinking skills to good use and started to see the positive side of things.
1. A chance to get rid of all of those bottles and foods that you hang on to because you might use them at some point. Ok, I used the word 'you'...but, maybe you don't. I do however.
2. You eat what you have, because otherwise it will go bad. For this reason, we had root beer floats for lunch. That ice cream was taking up some valuable freezer space, too.
3. One can really clean the fridge since it is completely empty.
4. An opportunity to live a little like you are in Europe. I went and bought croissants and fresh fruit on Sunday morning in lieu of eggs and bacon. It was pretty nice.
5. Coming to terms with the fact this is not even close to the worst that could happen and, frankly, it isn't that bad.
Hopefully we will get a functioning refrigerator in the next couple of weeks. Until then, we'll just pretend we are camping out. And try to eat all of the ice cream. #priorities
No comments:
Post a Comment