Have you ever noticed that Will and I have a lot of sagas? If you search this blog for “saga” you’ll come up with 4 different sagas… and those are only the ones I deemed comedic enough to post about. Maybe we’re too melodramatic. Well… another saga has made the list. Get ready for the great refrigerator saga of 2020 (though this saga spans multiple years). (Hint: you may want to scroll down to the craft so you can make yourself a beverage before you settle in to read this one.)
Well… let me start off by saying that our house is about 25 years old, and the previous owners left us with all original appliances. We didn’t mind because those things are workhorses! Unfortunately even workhorses get sent to the glue factory eventually (wow morbid! Animal farm much?) 3 years ago, I replaced an internal coil on our oven and managed to keep it in business, 2 years ago our washer and then dryer kicked the bucket (read: the drum on the washer actually rusted out and fell out the bottom of the washer). The dishwasher died in April of 2020 and the refrigerator died in August of 2020. We honestly didn’t realize the fridge was dying; we just thought the new bread we got didn’t freeze solid in the freezer, which we considered a bonus. Eventually we discovered that other items in the freezer weren’t frozen and we decided to order a new fridge.
Well… our house has this stupid built in cabinet around our fridge that is TINY. It is a narrow, and short. So short in fact that there is only one standard size fridge that really fits it – made by Whirlpool. I ordered that fridge from my favorite local appliance store, and got a call back with a warning that the fridge was out of stock and there were 400 people on the waitlist for that fridge. Wow. He thought it would be around November before we could get the fridge. Yikes. He was super helpful though and found us another model that would fit that they had in stock. Great. So we cleaned out the old fridge and they came to deliver the new one. The delivery person luckily thought to measure – and for some reason this fridge was 1/2″ too tall. I don’t know if it was me or the salesperson who messed up, but we were both annoyed. We decided to just wait for the other fridge in November since there really were no other fridges that fit.
Our other fridge by this point was basically dead – we thought it was limping along but one day I thought to put a thermometer in the fridge and it clocked in at 55. Terrifying. I was pregnant with Patricia and kept having nightmares about listeria (as if I needed any more things to add to my nightmares). So in a stroke of genius I called around home depots to see if they had anything in stock. The only fridges they had available were apartment sized fridges so we ended up with this 10.1cu ft model.
Let me tell you, it is tiny. 7.4 cu feet of fridge space is not much for a family of 3… soon to be 4. Going from a 22 cu ft model with 17 cu feet of fridge space to less than half of that space was challenging. I think the only thing that made it work was the full size freezer we have in the basement. So… skip ahead to November, and I don’t hear anything about the new Whirlpool fridge. I call before Thanksgiving and they have heard nothing from Whirlpool – none of the 400 fridges on backorder have come in. We have a minimalist Thanksgiving so we can fit it all in our tiny fridge.
I continue calling monthly to see if our fridge is in. It is not in. In February we get a call from the appliance store to say that they received a notice from Whirlpool that the model of fridge we have on backorder is no longer being manufactured at this time due to covid. They expect to resume manufacturing in the future. He asks if we want to stay on the waitlist and I say sure. I stop calling monthly. June rolls around and we get a call from the appliance store – by some crazy miracle our fridge is in! Unfortunately he called us the day after Tesla started our house, and we were not allowed to have anyone else on site so we had to postpone delivery. After Tesla rescheduled a couple times we finally postpone delivery the end of June. The appliance folks call back and we finally reschedule to July on my birthday.
By this point our oven had died too (more on that maybe in another post). So both get delivered without a hitch. As the delivery people are leaving, I notice the fridge door isn’t closing properly with that satisfying suction feel. The delivery person takes a look and notices that the door is not actually sealing – there is a 1/2″ gap around the seam of the refrigerator. He thinks it is probably just the gasket. The appliance store calls us and lets us know that they have asked their repair department to take a look, but that they are crazy backed up. They also let us know that they told the repair department to prioritize us since we’ve been waiting for this fridge since the civil war.
We hear nothing that day from the repair department, so at 4:30pm Will calls. They are very sympathetic and get us on the schedule for 7am the following day. The repair person shows up and fiddles around with the door for about 15 minutes. Will asks, “can it be fixed?” He shakes his head sadly. Apparently the internal hinge that mounts the door was installed crooked. The appliance company calls me back again, trying to offer me more solutions and clearly feeling very bad about this fridge. That’s where the saga ends. We have a useless fridge sitting in our kitchen as well as our tiny Magic Chef fridge, which I have become very fond of despite its small stature. Well that’s mostly where it ends – I did call a couple cabinet companies and I think maybe we have to replace our cabinets to get a bigger fridge.
Let me tell you, meal planning gets way harder when you have to figure out how to fit a week worth of groceries in a tiny fridge. You can’t have leftovers, ever. They just don’t fit. On top of that, we were too scared to do take out (I mean we were even having our groceries delivered). This meant that we cooked 3 meals a day every single day from March 2020 until we got vaccinated in May 2020. It was ridiculous. When we got vaccinated, Will and I started doing take out, and we’ve been doing it a bit too often. I’d say we have been eating out at least 8 meals a week. EIGHT MEALS. That is a ridiculous amount of take out. We still don’t like to go into the restaurants if we can avoid it (though we have made the exception for Indian food several times) so we usually do curbside pick up. I’m completely sick of take out, but Will and Julius aren’t. Actually I think the dead give away that we have overdone the take out was the conversation we had with Julius on Friday.
Me: Julius, we’re having grilled [vegetarian] sausages or hot dogs for dinner. Would you like a hot dog or a sausage?
Julius: I don’t want that for dinner, I want curbside pick up!!!
Later we figured out that curbside pickup meant quesadillas from Moe’s which Julius loves. He did eat a half sausage and half hot dog with cole slaw though, so I consider that meal a win.
Now, let’s calm your nerves with some tea! I made these shaped tea bags for my virtual spa ladies’ night, but I think they would be great for mother’s day or another special occasion. I made them all on the sewing machine, which took far less time and allowed me to make 30 of them in a relatively short amount of time. I think if you were to sew them by hand they were actually look a lot better and you could make more intricate shapes. I intend to try this at some point in the future…
Designer Tea Bags
What you’ll need:
- Loose leaf tea (I recommend my favorite company Harney & Sons – I used Indigo Punch for mine since I wanted something herbal and pretty)
- unbleached coffee filters
- Organic Cotton Natural thread (unbleached and undyed)
- Size 8 or 10 sewing machine needle for fine materials
- small funnel
- hand sewing needle
- Pink paper
- Place two coffee filters on top of one another. Iron them flat (cotton), make sure to move the iron frequently to keep from burning.
- Thread your machine with organic thread and a bobbin with organic thread. Insert fine needle.
- Free-hand stitch a heart onto your filters, starting at the side of the heart. Leave a 1″ gap.
- Insert funnel into the gap, and fill with 1 tsp of tea.
- Return heart to sewing machine and stitch over the gap to close it, back stitching at beginning and end to secure.
- Trim around the heart stitching, leaving a 1/4″ border.
- Using a cricut (or a scissor) cut out little hearts from the pink paper for your tea bag tag.
- Thread your hand sewing needle with organic cotton thread. Stitch through the stitching on one lobe of the heart, then knot. Stitch through a lobe of the paper heart (or circle cut out from cricut) and knot, leaving the thread 2.5 inches long. Trim.
