The Frugal Fridge Find

It snowed again last night, just enough to remind us that it wasn't spring yet. As winter continues to linger on, my thoughts keep turning to summer. One of the charming things about the cabin is the smaller scale of things. The house is smaller, the kitchen is smaller, the stove is smaller and the fridge is smaller, a lot smaller.

As you might imagine, with four kids, an apartment size fridge can be a bit of a complication to our simple summer existence. A small fridge means more frequent trips to the store. It also means that CSA pickup is a pain in the rear, rather than a bountiful joy, because it is such a challenge to fit things in the fridge.

Unfortunately, there's no room in the kitchen for a larger fridge so we were on the lookout for a fridge to put in the garage for the summer. We had a couple of requirements. It couldn't be more than a few years old because we didn't want it to be too inefficient. At the same time, we didn't want to pay for a new one because this fridge would be used only for the summer and the temperature extremes of being kept in an unheated garage over the winter takes a toll on the lifespan of appliances. We figured we'd keep our eyes open and see what we could find.

This weekend we got lucky and discovered a working fridge on our local ecycle list that was about 6 years old and in need of a new home. Jackpot! It fit in the back of our minivan. Double jackpot! It just needs the gasketing around the door replaced which is very minor in the grand scheme of things. The woman who gave it away even cleaned it first!

Some of you must be thinking, how do they always find all the stuff they're looking for? The answer is, we don't. I think we improve our odds of finding what we're looking for mainly by knowing what we want/need. If we hadn't thought about the problem of the small fridge and tried to figure out a solution, I'd never have given a second look to the email that told me about the larger fridge. Planning is everything when it comes to frugal living!