My wife and I purchased our current house sixteen years ago in 2004. It was strictly an emotional purchase. There were many, many obvious drawbacks to the house and property that were disregarded in the heat of the buying moment. We were in competition with other buyers and were advised by our realtor that we needed to make an offer immediately after our first and only viewing. Argh!
An elderly couple, the Fords, were the previous owners of the house. They spent the winters in Florida and didn’t put much money into the house up here in Rochester for several decades. Everything in the house screamed 1975. No updates. All of the appliances were old, old, old.
After we moved in, we updated various parts of the house when we could, but we weren’t millionaires. We had to prioritize. Sometimes it was by necessity when some old system (bathroom tiling, furnace, AC, oven, linoleum, etc.) reached its limit. The old, beige GE refrigerator in the kitchen was already laboring pretty hard when we bought the place. Every year, it struggled a little bit harder to keep the food cold. The recommended fridge temperature is 40F, but even with the settings set to the max, our fridge’s temp was about 50F (and even higher on warm days) according to the small thermometer we kept inside. On a hot summer day, if we didn’t have the air conditioning running, the ice cream in the freezer would partially melt. My wife and I put off buying a new fridge as long as possible, our budget is very tight these days, but a few weeks ago another bowl of partially-melted ice cream was the last straw. It was time to go refrigerator shopping.
I really don’t like to shop, but it had to be done. We spent an entire afternoon at the local Home Depot and Lowes big-box stores getting an education about refrigerators. My wife preferred a side-by-side model, but we were somewhat constricted by space because of a cabinet over the fridge area that would only accommodate models under 69″ high, which ruled out many options. The sales people at the two stores said delivery would be at least a month or six weeks away because the pandemic has played havoc with the new appliances supply chain.
I returned home with a headache from the shopping blitz. A relative suggested we try a smaller, family-owned appliance store in town; Charlotte Appliance. We drove to the store the next morning and they had one Whirlpool side-by-side model left. We jumped on it. Badda bing, badda boom. Three days later the new fridge was delivered and installed (top photo).
My wife and I are so appreciative that the food in the new fridge is actually COLD and the ice cream is frozen SOLID. Whoopee!!!
As a semi-humorous aside, whenever I heard/read Revelation 3:15-16 and its mention of “lukewarm” the last ten or so years, I thought of our struggling GE fridge and its lukewarm/lukecold food.
Postscript: Sorry, I should have included a “before” photo of our old GE jalopy fridge.
excatholic4christ 