This is completely off-topic so if you were expecting an illuminating post about writing for children, you can skip this right now. This is about the new house. Or specifically about the old refrigerator that came with the new house. It is built-in. It is a built-in SubZero. Wow, you say. Lucky you.

Not so lucky. First off, I liked my old refrigerator just fine. I imagine it to be rather lonely stuck off in the garage, away from us, home to just the leftover beer and soda from the move party. The new fridge doesn’t like me. In order to open the freezer drawer on the bottom you need to be standing in just the right place, with BOTH HANDS evenly spaced on either side of the center and pull back with a slight (but not too much) downward motion. Can I just say that it is hard to stand in front of it and do that with the island pushed up against my backside. It never takes me less than 5 tries to open the freezer. I can get the refrigerator door open in one try if I use both hands. I’m not liking any of this much at all but I was willing to live with it.

Except.

Except that this is a refrigerator that has had a funky smell in it since we moved in. The cleaners cleaned it. We cleaned it. I left 20 mounds of baking soda in it the week before we moved in. My husband took every shelf and drawer and drip pan and any removable part off and washed it in a bleach solution. I called SubZero and they also suggested flushing the drain pipe with the bleach solution. We did.

It still stinks.

But only when it is running. When it is off, it smells fine. Which leads my husband to think that it is in the actual system that we can’t get to because a) it’s built-in and b) we’ve pretty much exhausted our ability as do-it-yourselfers.

Sigh.

So I admit defeat and call the home warranty plan that the previous owners unexpectedly included in our contract. A plan that I was sure we had checked out completely. Only, (you know what’s coming but like a train wreck you are going to keep on reading, right?)

For some reason, we assumed, thought, whatever, that the built-in refrigerator was in the home warranty plan. I called today to see if they would come service it for the smell and IT ISN’T COVERED. We could have added it within the first 30 days which were up, of course, less than a week ago.
 
I feel so dumb for not catching that in the contract and mad and frustrated and well, mostly mad. If this were a normal kitchen we’d just dump that old thing (it’s an old model – more than 10 years old) and bring OUR old fridge into the house (it’s only 3 years old, and did I happen to mention how much I loved it.) But this thing is built-in. And being a SubZero, this one is counter depth and our old one is not. To replace it with the comparable SubZero is nearly $7K. For that price I could get my new fence installed.

The alternative is to take it out anyway and slide the old one in there. Which means it will look funky as heck, okay, not even funky but ugly and stick out and we wouldn’t really be able to walk around the island.

I’d love to end this with some witty bit of something but I’m not seeing the humor in this yet.

Score: House 1, Susan 0 (SubZero, to be exact)