Getting a replacement refrigerator is driving my crazy! I need to get rid of the ancient one in the basement. My initial thought was kind of to automatically get rid of the ancient one, have the current bottom freezer kitchen one moved in its place and have a new bottom freezer one installed in the kitchen.
If you think you've read about this too often, there were newer problems. So you might as well read on...
Turned out, I din't consider the height of the new one. I thought all refrigerators were the same height! And I discovered my preferred new one was 1/2" too tall for the spot. So I had to cancel that order and reconsider.
The existing kitchen one is working fine, and I go into the cool parts/crispers much more often than the bottom freezer. So it is actually OK.
In the basement, I am into the freezer much more than the crisper drawers. So I decided getting a new top freezer fridge for the basement actually made more sense. And I ordered one with same dimensions as the kitchen one. And I chose the top-ranked Consumer Reports rated model.
I'm not being snobbish. It's not like it's gold-plated or anything, just their best choice among the mass-sold refrigerators.
But I did my measurements about width thinking a new refrigerator would come through front door, to the kitchen. And the current one would easily go down to the basement (since it was the same stairs. Oh was I ever WRONG.
First, the new basement refrigerator was going to be delivered through the garage and into the basement. I spent 2 hours moving basement clutter out of the way. That's temporary and will encourage me to put stuff away afterwards in a more organized fashion.
But the garage-to-basement path wasn't involved in my original measurements. The door from garage to basement is too narrow! OK, so in the front door and down the stairs to the basement. And then I measured the down-from-the-bottom-of-the-stairs to the basement. Too narrow.
OK, surely the sliding glass door from the basement to the back yard is wide enough. No. It seemed a 33x34" refrigerator could not be delivered! I was about to call and cancel the order and then reorder a narrower one.
But some door dimensions can be changed! The sliding glass basement door has a screen. And that screen even when fully-opened) was the. So I found a way to slightly detach it and gain the necessary inch. But the glass door itself was still too narrow. OK, there was accumulated dirt preventing full opening. I scraped the dirt and vacuumed it out of the slide tracks.
Still not enough, and the door kept hitting something hard. I saw that a security guard was taking up a 1/2". I removed it. Still not enough room.
But stay with me here...
There is a lock on the sliding glass basement door. The kind where you turn one small dial and then slide a lever down to lock it. It sticks out 1/2". With that lock removed and the sliding door able to open as fully as possible (dirt and security bar removed, I get a 33 1/2" opening. The narrowest dimension of the new refrigerator is 33"! A 1/2" of clearance is as good as a foot...
The new refrigerator can be delivered and installed! YAY... 😊
But it means the delivery guys think they have a smooth path through the garage and basement, and now they have to carry it around to the back of the house.
Aside from all that, I had to have the existing ancient refrigerator moved out of the way (because I didn't pay for removal). I did that myself last night. I took almost everything out of it and packed the frozen stuff in a large plastic storage container. Because I didn't know how long it would take to move it.
Actually it only took 30 minutes. The place I could put it had stuff piled up there and those things had to be put somewhere out of the way. If the basement was cluttered before, it is worse now. But that is temporary. But I have the ancient refrigerator out of the way, but working, so all the food went back in until the new one is installed.
I'll post about the delivery/installation in a day or two.
