Today, our first ever new fridge was delivered. When we bought the house at Blackthorn, they left a perfectly good fridge behind, which served us for the entirety of our time in that house. Then, when we sold Blackthorn and bought a house on Twenty Seventh Street, it too came with a perfectly good fridge. Nothing fancy, but it did the job. Finally, after many years in our kitchen it needs replacing.

I went off to the appliance places and box stores to look at fridges, as Sheila was working. There were some size restrictions in our kitchen to consider. I finally found a fridge I thought would be fine for us with a price tag we could be satisfied with. It turns out you can’t order a left-hand hinge door. As near as I can tell, they all come with the hinge on the right, but they’re made so that they can be reversed. I learned that this is a job you can either do yourself, or hire someone to do the work for $110. If I ever buy another fridge, I’ll pay the $110 and hire a pro.

I asked the salesperson if it was difficult to reverse the hinges. “Can an average Joe without engineering papers do the job or should I hire someone?” “Oh, you can do it, no problem. I’ve done it. It takes like 5 minutes”. Let me assure you that it is not a 5 minute job. It is nothing like a 5 minute job. The instructions are accurate but not easy for me to follow. I looked for a YouTube video. The fridges they used in the videos didn’t look at all like ours in terms of the hinge system, but they gave me an idea of what I had to do. . Eventually I worked it out and managed to successfully reverse the doors. All the steps made sense after the fact, but when you’re doing it the instructions seem just a bit too unclear to imagine the whole process.

The top hinge has a post that reverses so the same hinge can be used on the opposite side. The hinge has a plastic cover that protects it and makes it visually go away. Once you change the hinges, you need a different cover, a mirror of the one that came on the fridge. It took me a really long time to find this. It’s just a stupid plastic cover piece but I wanted to complete the installation fully and have the fridge look good and function well. Finally I found it. It was cast into the underside of the plastic piece that covers wiring and the hinge stuff. I must have looked at that cover a couple dozen times before finally I could see the plastic piece I was looking for. Nowhere in the instructions did it suggest where to look.

One thing about replacing a fridge. It’s a great opportunity to purge all the almost empty condiment jars, old salad dressing, almost empty jam jars, unidentified objects, cheese that’s gone hard and so on.