#37- Fridge

My fridge is old.
It's stained
It's rusty
It's an energy sucker
It's stinky (that could be my fault...)
Solution? Buy a new one. Reality? Save a few bucks first...
It would be just SO easy to buy a new fridge though...it would solve ALL my problems. I would never have to clean my new fridge. It would clean itself. I would never have to worry about rust, it'd be ir-rustable. As for energy, obviously my fridge would have to be the newest on the block to clean itself so obviously it would be energy efficient...but obviously we won't be buying the newest fridge on the block from Kijiji :)


After many days (weeks..? I don't want to say months. But that could also be true) of grumbling about my stinkyoldstainedsucker fridge, I one day decided to roll up my sleeves and see what could come out of a good clean.
At the  end of a day, I do not want to clean anything.
All day I say to myself, "I'll have time to clean when the kids go to bed", but let's be real, at the end of the day all I want to do is look at my way-cooler-friends lives on facebook (studying, avoiding studying, and posting lame links and photos..) and gaze at beautiful pictures of immaculate homes on pintrest and read how EASY it is to make YOUR home look like this. As long as I'm sitting, I'm feelin' fine.
But not that night! That night I cleaned my fridge. 
The result was glorious. to me anyway, some good elbow grease and it was actually a lot shinier in there than I ever remember, it almost looked new! Or to me anyway. Students rented this house before us, and there were certain parts that I simply could not scrub off whatever residue it was, but luckily it was behind one of the drawers, sooooooo.......
I even organized the food and condiments and put leftovers in pretty little see-through-containers just like those organized girls who would NEVER put leftover casserole in an old margarine container with a yogurt lid. (Gasp!!)
I tried to clean the outer fridge, but alas, even bleach couldn't remove the rust and stains. But every time I opened that fridge for the next 14 hours (I went to bed, woke up, used the fridge a couple times, and by noon it was looking rather disorganized again) I was blessed to see how tidy and clean it looked.
This is, after all, the only fridge I have. 
And I was reminded of a valuable lesson that has been easy to forget living in the city and being influenced so much by 'if it's old, if it's inconvenient, if it makes you unhappy, get a new one!" attitude;
Take care of what you have until it dies. 
Be gentle with it. Love it. Clean it. Tend to it. Don't abuse it. Learn how to use it.


The fridge is certainly on its last legs (literally) but until the day it simply sputters out, I'll try to clean it more than once a year.