Fridge 2.0

Our moving company on the Chicago-side casually mentioned that they worked with a company in the Chicago suburbs that sold European-voltage appliances. We could buy a UK-ready fridge in the USA, avoid paying US sales tax, and ship it with our stuff. Seemed like a good idea. I did some price matching USA vs UK and found that refrigerators here ain't what we used to in the US. They are smaller, come in funny shapes, and they are really expensive. Based on that, we ended up buying a Maytag, a side-by-side fridge with ice and water in the door. Nice.

While the fridge was en route across the Atlantic, we came to the realization that that fridge was gigantic (seriously, nearly double the size of most) by English standards and that we really didn't have a good spot (if any) to put it in the Lilacs. Uh-oh. So then we tried to sell it -- we could sell it for half of what someone would pay here and we would still break even. Even at that price, we couldn't find any takers.

Saturday afternoon, we bit the bullet and decided to bring in the English über-fridge. This meant that the wife and I had to carry the fridge from the garage, then around the house, then get it in the door, and put it in place.

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4 hours later... after we had to take the door off the house (which meant breaking the 60 years of paint off the hinges), then take the door and hinges off the fridge (the manual said to call an qualified engineer if this was required - whatever!), then remove a shelf (same paint issues), and so on and so forth... we slid the fridge into place and turned it on.

It took us about 10 seconds to decide we had made the right decision. The crammed little fridge in the picture was our temporary fridge that we borrowed from Rach's office. I'll give her packing skills credit but it wasn't the most convenient thing (and everything near the tiny icebox froze). And good luck fitting a beer in there.

The bottom picture is the new fridge, at least what I could fit in the picture frame. We made an extra shopping trip today to fill Big Ben (we named our fridge -- I think we miss our friends). We now have ice, cold beer, cold cider, meats, cheeses, salad dressings, pickles... it's beautiful! Now I can get that half a lamb I've been eye-balling over at the butchers.