He's a good refridgerator. My parents bought him years ago, and when Tom and I lived with my mother while our last house was being built we agreed to do a fridge-swap, since she didn't need something so big, and we did! And he's served us extremely well ever since!
He does jut out further than the cabinets on the left, and the dishwasher on the right in our current kitchen, though. So we decided we needed to make him feel a little more at home in his position in our still new (to us) house, by building him a home.
We went demolition yard shopping for VJ boards to create some little walls for Mr Fridge (so much cheaper and much better quality timber than trying to buy them new), which inevitably involved a considerable amount of paint scraping. I donned my paint-scraping outfit - mask, safety glasses, hat, gloves, and worked for hours removing the paint off our boards.
After sanding came washing...
And then undercoating and painting...
And then it was time to assemble them.
Since the nails we chose to use to link the boards together were a little bit too long, Daniel got grinding duty. Let's just say he seemed to enjoy it.
Allie couldn't care less.
Then it was my job to fill in the notches in the timber with wood putty...
A couple more coats of paint, and we were ready to move things to the kitchen.
And then we struck a snag. A pretty serious snag.
Well, Tom did.
He very inconveniently managed to almost cut his right thumb off while cutting the tongue off the edge of VJ (which are a tongue and groove kind of system) little walls we had built.
Amazingly, Tom avoided damaging anything irreparable, and many stitches later, he was back in operation. Albeit less left-hand-involved operation.
Neeldless to say, he has learnt his lesson. BE CAREFUL WITH CIRCULAR SAWS!!!!! Consider this a community service announcement.
Allie is still not that into it. Chewing bones is much more interesting.
Trooper that he is, regardless of hand injuries and uninterested dogs, Tom persevered and got our fridge walls together.
And installed! Please admire the wonderfulness!
To ensure that the walls would stay in place, we screwed them to the side of the cabinets on the left there, but also decided to put screws through the edge against the kitchen wall that borders Daniel's bedroom. Unfortunately this now involves screws through Daniel's wall. But we can cover those with putty too, and it will all be good. All in the name of wall security!
We then decided to face the inevitable and get an electrician in to power us up. See, since getting our power reconnected months ago, we've had a serious power supply issue in the kitchen. NO power points (and I seriously mean ZERO) powerpoints in or near the kitchen have actually been operational. So our kitchen power has come via extension lead from the power point just outside the master bedroom since the electricity was turned on. Not ideal, since it still required us to run only one appliance at a time for fear of overloading a single powerpoint.
So. With our new fridge nook (or house, as I'd like to think of it) being built, we decided it was time to deal with this power supply issue.
While we were at it we got extra powerpoints added for dishwasher, microwave and above benchtop, so now that wall possibly has more powerpoints than the entire house combined 'til then!
And so, behold our beautiful fridge nestled into his very own house!
We still have a top shelf to add, but it's a definite improvement! Makes poor deserving Mr Fridge feel like he has a place in our new home, at least!
