27th Street

Frank Fairfield and Meredith Axelrod (and Frank takes a question). I enjoy both these performers, and it’s fun to hear them together too. In this one they seem to have walked out of an old 78 recording.

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. 

A couple Newfoundland tunes…. Daniel Payne on fiddle. Matthew Byrne on guitar. Aaron Collis on squeezebox.