Doh!

Our new fridge arrived today. It should have been a happy thing as living out of ice chests is not the most convenient thing ever, but unfortunately, when the fridge arrived it was very clearly a counter depth fridge rather than standard depth. What that means is that the capacity of the new fridge is significantly less than our old fridge. Kevin and I usually do a lot of research before making big purchases, but due to the untimely death of the old appliance, we did not have as much time to make a selection as we usually do. In our attempts to balance what we needed with what was available, we both missed the “counter depth” part of the description.

We decided to give it a couple of days to see if we could live with it, but it didn’t take either of us that long to decide that we hated it. When I put the miniscule amount of chilled food that we had in the new fridge, it got full alarmingly fast. And we didn’t have a lot on hand-a half gallon each of milk and soy milk, a carton of eggs, a tub of butter, a package of lunch meat, a few veggies. That was really it since so much of what was in the fridge when it met its demise ended up in the trash. We picked up just a few necessities from the store (We had some friends loan us a mini fridge to keep the milk and eggs in, which has been quite a blessing, but just those couple of things filled it up.) and have been living on freezer meals and sandwiches. So within just a couple of hours, Kev was on the phone trying to track down a different fridge. Luckily for us, he was able to find just one that is better suited to our needs and was in stock right now, so he dashed off to Lowes to make the purchase. He initiated the return on the counter depth fridge at the same time and arranged to have that one picked up when the second new one arrives next Tuesday. 

The upside to all this is that at least we have a working fridge for the next week while we wait for our next delivery day. It’s like a really expensive rental where we get our full deposit back in a week. The new new fridge is also significantly cheaper than the counter depth one. Another perk is that we will make sure to give the details of a big purchase a closer look if we find ourselves in a sticky situation like this again. I’m hoping not to need that particular bit of knowledge any time soon. I’m much happier when I have the luxury of time to fully weigh the pros and cons of any big-ticket items.