The Saga of the Refrigerator

We now have water damage to our hardwood flooring in the kitchen. Evidently the hose to the ice maker leaked. The wood floor is wavy and the linoleum in the laundry room has lifted. The insurance adjuster was here yesterday, and the verdict is that the flooring in the kitchen, dining room, living room and powder room must be repaired and refinished. And the laundry room will need new lino. So we will have to move everything out of all those rooms, and then move ourselves out for three days. Our deductible isn't very big, and the insurance will pay for our staying in a motel, so we won't have a lot of expense with all of this, but we will have a lot of bother! I don't look forward to boxing up everything in the buffet, china hutch and bookcases. We'll have to hire people to move the furniture and disconnect the gas clothes dryer, etc., etc. Such fun. We also have to get a plumber to fix the hose connection to the dear new refrigerator!

Sometimes Good Things Happen

We bought a beautiful refrigerator with Dutch doors and a freezer on the bottom two and a half years ago. Within a couple of weeks we knew something was wrong with it because it kept freezing everything in the top part as well as the freezer. So a repair man came out and discovered some of the packing material hadn't been removed and the air wasn't circulating. A few more weeks went by and we had to call him out again. Something else was wrong and the temperature wouldn't stay where it belonged and everything froze. So a part was ordered and he came out again and fixed the problem.

Fast forward: Sometime within the next six months everything in the freezer had ice crystals all over. Repair man again. Then whenever the drawer of the freezer was pulled out to get ice, the arm on the ice maker threw ice behind the drawer, onto the defrost tray and then speeding out across the floor. Repair man again, and again, and again and again. Sometime during these visits when I spoke with Sears about the problems we were encountering I was told that if we had more than three repair visits within a year we were to get a new refrigerator. This sounded great because we were rapidly getting our three in! However - the catch was that it had to be for the same problem. Once it was the arm, once it was the ice maker itself, and then again it was the arm. Now we have an extended warranty, so we weren't paying for these repair calls, but they were adding up for Sears! Each repair visit averaged about $180 just for the repair man, not for the parts. We had just about figured out that the cost of repairing the refrigerator had now reached almost what we paid for it.

In all of this the contract repair men were wonderful, helpful, courteous and just as frustrated as we became.

I finally had Bill call Sears the last three times because I was so frustrated. I had to clear out the freezer section each time the repair man came so he could take out the drawer to work on the ice maker. Bill got extremely angry during the last call because he kept being transferred to different sections of Sears Customer Solutions - and there were no solutions. He even threatened to sue, although we wouldn't have done that - we're too old to go through that, and it would have cost us more than a new refrigerator.

Well - the happy end of the story is - this afternoon we got a call from a very apologetic man at Sears telling us that we were to get a new refrigerator! Tomorrow we'll go up to Sears and pick out one - up to $2,200.00!! And they will deliver it and take away the poor lemon at no charge to us.

That is what I call customer satisfaction!

We will not get a refrigerator with the ice maker in the freezer where it can throw ice cubes on the floor this time. We will get a refrigerator with the ice maker in the door with the water dispenser so we can have ice cubes fall on the floor along with dripping water!

Brrrrrrrrrrr

It is really cold here! Cold for the coast, anyway. When I got up this morning the temperature was 25 degrees. Now it is 32 at noon. Even my rhododendrons froze last night - and the daphne looks very sad. I hope they'll all come back. The hummingbird feeder was frozen as well, so the poor little hummer had better go south.

We have almost finished the Christmas cards, and next week I'll start baking, and Bill will start making his peanut brittle. This week is pretty busy with a P.E.O. luncheon tomorrow, a trip to Portland to the dermatologist on Wednesday, and a League of Women Voters luncheon on Thursday. Next Sunday is the Holiday Party at the rec center. I have a cheese/cranberry thing for that, and I'll also make a wine cake.

In between we're getting a new furnace tomorrow, and we hope the appliance repair man will be here to fix our refrigerator again - for the fourth time this year. I think we are now eligible for a new one! This one is only two years old and the repair people have been here eight times.

I've been finding a lot of new recipes for cookies, and since I'm in a baking mood I'll try some out next week. It feels like winter outside, but I'm not really into the mood of the season yet. Baking will help that!