Category: June 2019

I measured! It should fit!

I bought a brand new fancy refrigerator. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite slide into the spot where it’s supposed to go.

I’ve never had such a nice, fancy refrigerator. It has a new feature called “showcase”, which is a little hard to describe but basically it has a double door such that you can access the “door” items from both sides.

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I’m going to make this refrigerator fit. It’s not like it’s the wrong size. The refrigerator is 35 inches wide. I measured my space to be just over 36 inches wide.

I’ve got over an inch to spare, so why won’t it fit?!?

Turns out the cabinet was installed crooked. I had assumed the narrowest point was where the counter sticks out slightly from the cabinet. But the cabinet was installed so crooked that the widest point is actually down at the base of the cabinet. Here you can see the gap between the cabinet and the stove down toward the bottom. The stove is straight. The cabinet is not.

So it’s crazy, but I’ve got a guy coming tomorrow to remove the cabinet and straighten it out by an inch. An inch!

Update (two days later)

So the guy reinstalled the cabinet and now the refrigerator mostly fits.

Sort of. Turns out that the door hinge can’t be tight against the wall because the hinge edge of the door swings out slightly when the door is opened.

If you’re like, what the heck is that a picture of? It’s a birds-eye view of the top of the refrigerator in Santa Fe, which does the same thing.

Both refrigerators, the one in Santa Fe and the one in our new house, have a wall on one side, so the refrigerator has to stick out past the wall, by the depth of the door, to give the door maneuvering room.

Silly me, I bought counter-depth refrigerator so it wouldn’t stick out into the doorway, not realizing that it needed to stick out into the doorway in order for the refrigerator door to work. This means I currently can’t push my refrigerator all the way back.

At the Santa Fe house, the wall ends in a wide opening between the kitchen and dinning room, so you don’t notice that the refrigerator sticks out slightly into that opening.

But at our new house, it’s a doorway, not a wide opening. So it’s pretty obvious the refrigerator is sticking into the doorway.

The best solution would be to remove the door jam and open that whole space up. I didn’t want a door there anyway. It’s between the kitchen and laundry room, but the pantry is in the laundry room, so the door is just in the way. So I don’t mind taking the door and part of that wall out, but it’s going to be a biggish job.

After removing the door jam and redoing any framing & support that’s necessary, the drywall and texture will need redone. I will also have to have the floor tile patched. There’s no tile under the few inches of wall that I need to remove.

All that just to get a normal sized refrigerator in there! The previous owners must have had a really small one. It was gone before they put the house on the market so we didn’t realize.

Just a quick note to explain why I haven’t posted much of anything recently. It’s not that there’s nothing going on…

After I quit my job, I went to Boston for a week, then we staged the Placitas house for sale, then we were in California for a week, then the moment we were back from California I started showing one of our rentals to prospective tenants and getting the usual between-tenants maintenance done (a broken window, sprinklers not working, etc.) which took a week, then we moved some of our stuff into our new house (the boxes that came out of the Placitas house), then I flew to San Diego, then I was barely back for one day and we turned around and drove to Utah for John’s birthday (it’s our annual tradition), and now this week is booked solid with appointments like refrigerator delivery and meeting with contractors to get quotes for various things like electrical work.

Meanwhile John’s been assembling and installing and troubleshooting and moving heavy items in and out of our pickup truck and to and from Home Depot.

What hasn’t happened yet is I still haven’t packed up my stuff in Santa Fe. Augh! I’m really looking forward to getting my stuff moved from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. The pod has been out there waiting for a couple of weeks now, sitting in the driveway empty.

I’m thinking I might have time to go up there today and start packing, but first I have several errands to run (Home Depot, Lowe’s, groceries, etc.) and then I have a coaching client at noon (which is over the phone so I can do that in either Santa Fe or Albuquerque), and then I have to be back in Albuquerque to meet another contractor at 4:00. So maybe I should just wait and go up to Santa Fe tomorrow and get all my errands done today. Because I’m tired.

Anyway I have tons of stories for you, like why the refrigerator doesn’t fit even though I carefully measured, and my hunt for the dead thing in the air vents, and the 1950’s style old-guy salesman with a briefcase of samples who tried to get me to buy a $4,000 door – haha, seriously?

Bottom line is we’re fine. We’re working really hard and spending a disconcerting amount of money. I’ve got two rentals turning over this month and next, so I’m having work done in both of them as well as lots of things done in the new house. So in addition to traveling, plus packing and unpacking, my life is primarily scheduling and meeting with contractors. And buying things at Lowe’s.

Hopefully when I have time, I can tell you all about the various projects in subsequent posts. Plus our recent trips – I’ve got some beautiful photos of Utah.