Thursday, December 8, 2011

On the chilly side...

Just so you know, it does get cold in Florida. It is currently a chilly 43 degrees which is only 9 degrees warmer than at my parent's house in Maine. Since it is so chilly, I thought it would be a good day to introduce our new chilly item in the kitchen.

Here is the old chilly item. It was a very tiny, very inefficient refrigerator that didn't even fill out the hole in the wall (which will fit only 19.5 cu. ft. fridges).


Around Columbus day this year, our City announced that they would give a $200 credit to your electric bill if you upgraded a non-energy efficient fridge to an energy efficient one. That with the holiday sales associated with Columbus day got us to go out and look, and look and look. Since the hole in the wall is pretty small, we were restricted to a very small subset of fridges. We also wanted a specific type of fridge.

With all the apartments we have lived in, we have had pretty much every type of fridge you can have. By far our favorite was one with the freezer on the botom. Also, we really like the french door top. These of course are more expensive, but the smaller size of the fridge kept the cost down.

When we went to look, we found a fridge at Lowe's that I liked a lot, but we wanted to look around to see if we could get a better deal on it (it was marked down about $250 including our 5% off). We went to basically every store that we knew carried fridges and we couldn't find a better deal.

Then we went to Best Buy on a whim. They happened to have the same exact fridge for $400 off the list price. This made us extremely happy (plus apparently they keep copious amounts of bottle water in some of the fridges that they will give you for free :)). The guy was really nice and printed out everything so that we could price match the fridge over at Lowe's.

Each Lowe's seems to be different, but at this particular one, since they were giving us a discount for the price match, they were initially not going to give us the 5% off. After reasoning with them for awhile, we finally got them to include the 5% and they even gave us 12 months no interest financing. All in all we paid about half of what we normally would for this fridge. It is a Samsung 19.5 cu. ft french door stainless steel look (aka fingerprints don't show up!) with a ice maker. We got really lucky that there was already a water supply behind the old fridge so we just hooked it up and threw out the ice trays! We opted for the model without a water dispenser since we still have our Brita and I get annoyed with how slowly the water comes out of those things.



As you can see, I measured really carefully. The guys that installed us got the old refrigerator out, and got this one in front of the opening and I must admit that it didn't look like it was going to fit. Luckily it slid right in and fit perfectly. The guys installed it were pretty impressed that it fit too... apparently more often than not, they don't.


Even though this is a small fridge, it fits more stuff in it than I could ever imagine. For our Thanksgiving party, we had a 23 lb turkey, a ham, multiple casserole dishes, cans of soda and much more and it still had room to spare. So far we are really happy  with it.




With the renovations we have planned, the wall that the refrigerator is in will go away, but for now the kitchen is significantly more functional.



I have one more kitchen upgrade to show you tomorrow. It is a fun little addition that didn't cost anything but also significantly increases functionality. You'll also notice that all the upgrades we did won't be affected by the renovations we have planned. Things may get moved around a little, but the things are here for the long run. 

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