Refrigerator Purgatory: Days 1-7

Dear readers, I’m speaking with you from my place in Refrigerator Purgatory. At only five years old, it met a sudden, untimely demise on a Tuesday. I noticed there wasn’t any new ice in the ice maker, and I discovered the severity of the situation when I reached for something in the freezer and it went squish in my hand. Luckily, we have a chest freezer, so all was not lost, but I did learn the grossest thing I’ve ever touched in my 31 years is partially thawed french fries. If you ever come across them, run away. You’ve been warned.

At that point, the refrigerator was still working, but not quite cold enough. So we babied it along for two days until we realized the inevitable had come — we had to move everything out of the fridge and use Ohio’s natural refrigerant to keep our food cold. One of the small saving graces of this situation. After cleaning everything from my fridge and freezer, I learned a few things:

1. We have a thousand partially full salad dressings.
2. We had some truly terrifying shit in the back of our freezer.
3. The back side of a fridge is like the dark side of the moon. It’s there, but you’ve never seen it.

With all our foodstuffs now outside on the deck, it came time to use YouTube and Dr. Google to diagnose our sad, sad little refrigerator. Jason took it apart. He cleaned the coils and vacuumed out the sketchy, dusty underside. We spent hours troubleshooting the problem. Well, if this does this, then it’s this, but not when it does this, in which case it’s this. But it was never any of the “thises” we hoped it would be. I now have an associates degree in refrigerator sound diagnostics, and Jason is a professional refrigerator technician. We’re very proud.

We hoped for a miracle, that it was just a little lapse in judgement from our appliance and it would get right with the lord and come back to us. But, no. After many frustrating hours, debating whether it would be worth it to buy a new fridge or call someone out to repair it, we surrendered to our fate.

See what happens next in part two of our saga.