2023, home, Uncategorized

The Beast

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Today’s post is from Krista

There is a Beast in my kitchen. It’s been there all along, ever since I moved here. Black and huge, it sits in the corner, humming to itself and sucking up kilowatts of energy all day and all night, every day. It causes me to use “22 percent more than efficient nearby homes.” I glare at it and sometimes curse it. Then it builds up frost in its bottom compartment and forces me onto my knees to clean it. Then it resumes humming and sucking up kilowatts, contributing to climate change and irking me even more.

I didn’t buy this Beast. I wouldn’t have even looked at it in a store. Black appliances just don’t look right to me. I guess I wouldn’t like the old shades of olive or gold these things once came in either though, so I just try to get along with it. Plus, it’s a huge thing. I have no need for that much refrigerator space.

Yesterday the inevitable happened. A cutting board slid down into the narrow space between the kitchen counter and The Beast. My favorite cutting board. I had to move The Beast to retrieve it.

The Beast has wheels in the front but it just drags along in its rear. The wheels don’t engage unless you use a ratcheting tool to elevate its footrests. I have to remember these steps as I struggle with it. Finally I got it raised so that the wheels were on the floor and ready for action. Inch by inch, back and forth, I coaxed The Beast out of its corner.

Did I mention that my kitchen is just 3 feet wide? So once I got The Beast out of its corner, I had to move it all the way across to the other counter before I could even see behind it, and still there wasn’t enough room for me to squeeze my shoulders through the gap. I shouldn’t have looked… Out came the homemade cleaning solution and the vacuum cleaner and the rags. I had to use a reacher to get some of it done, and to grab my cutting board, as well as a beloved picture that had also fallen back there. I got it clean though, and I eased The Beast around to line it up a little closer to the counter so that mishaps like this don’t happen again. Gradually I got The Beast back in its clean corner, steadily humming and sucking up kilowatts.

I need new appliances. Most of them are well past prime and not functioning properly, except for The Beast and the stove. It works as it should as long as I keep its voluminous doors closed. I’m not at all eager to buy new appliances.

Do you have any appliances you’d like to vent about? Describe an experience moving something huge in a small space.

26 thoughts on “The Beast”

  1. Vacuum cleaners are a small appliance, I guess – our upright and the shop-vac are both so old that they need replacing, which could happen any day now. I finally tried to change the bag on the old Eureka upright (from the 80s?) – it still had a paper bag which had burst… 😐 and the replacement bag I was assured would fit this dinosaur are barely workable.

    Then there’s a cool-mist humidifier “inherited” from our friend W that says it will run for 24 hours and shut off by itself. It shuts itself off multiple times a day – seems it overheats and needs to cool down for a while. I could probably look up instructions online if it knew its name…

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  2. There have been many occasions I’ve battled refrigerator beasts during sheet vinyl installations. They must be removed from the kitchen. The worst ones are the large sized that were delivered without doors and now cannot fit through a kitchen passage. Oh, and filled with food. It gets complicated by the typical icemaker/water dispenser. Remove doors. Move appliance out. Replace doors. Install floor. Remove doors. Move refrigerator back to space. Replace doors. All must be done without damaging anything.
    Installing carpet in spaces with pianos and pool tables is a challenge. Move unit to far side of the room. Remove existing flooring up to the unit. Move unit to center of room. Remove remainder of existing flooring. Move unit to far side of room. Install pad up to unit. Position carpet up to unit. Move unit over doubled up carpet (that is the hardest part) to center of room. Finish pad installation. Move unit to far side of room. Begin carpet stretching operations which require moving unit along far side wall. Complete stretching. Replace unit to original position. Exhausting. Oh, and as often as not, accomplished alone. Sad.

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    2. I have wondered how they got The Beast up here. I can’t imagine it fitting through any door. My brother told me they probably had to take the doors off and the bottom freezer door out. That makes sense but it’s still enormous and they had to bring it up a flight of concrete steps to get it to the front door, then through the narrow doorway in a narrow entry space. The stairs are immediately in front of them after clearing the front door. I just can’t imagine how they did it. Unless they built the condo around the Beast!

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  3. My refrigerator doesn’t have a name, but it did need to get wrangled during our kitchen cabinet project. Luckily, we weren’t doing the floor so we we didn’t have to take it entirely out of the kitchen or remove the doors, as Wes mentioned. It did require a couple of big cardboard boxes from the hardware store to roll on. We have linoleum in the kitchen and if you pull the refrigerator on that, then you’ll be getting new linoleum. And of course there aren’t any trades people who want to help you wrangle a refrigerator these days so the first movement out of iis pace was just me and why a. Moving it back was just me.

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    1. And I failed to mention finding the correct screw drivers and wrenches to take off the doors and loosen the water connections. They are always metric and of multiple styles.
      And then there are washers and dryers. All are a curse to flooring mechanics.

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  4. We have a dishwasher with a computer that seems to be communicating with space aliens–lots of beeps and boops and clicking and display panel lights flashing on and off like strobe lights. It’s driving my wife crazy. At least weekly she grits her teeth and says, “We gotta get a new dishwasher!” Yet, it still does a nice job on the dishes, as long as you don’t disturb it once it starts. If you open it 20 minutes into the cycle to slip in a coffee cup or a fork, you’re screwed. Best solution invariably involves cutting the power and basically rebooting the computer.

    And don’t get me started on the “Rule of 7” story about installing that badboy! *grrrrr*

    Chris in Owatonna

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  5. We bought this house in 2018. The appliances “came with”. They are probably vintage about 2012, so are too new to replace, but too old to be maximum efficient. A friend just replaced his fridge, and commented on how quiet it is. I thought, “ours is noisy”. The stovetop is radiant electric with a glass top. I’m thinking, “induction would be better.” But, other projects will come first.

    Out in the garage, there’s a 1952 table saw and a cheap radial arm saw, I could dump them both without hesitation and use better ones from the subscription tool library, but, hey, then I wouldn’t OWN (and isn’t that what it’s all about?)

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  6. when I was 17 I moved with three friends to one of those monster home Portland and lake was a beautiful woodwork and a marvelous living room, dining room and stairway banister going upstairs today for five bedrooms. I had a upright grand piano and I’m moving day. Lots of friends were there, beer and drugs were plentiful and it was no problem getting eight guys to help me move the piano up the stairs when we got to the top there was no way to turn the corner so the only logical solution was to pick the piano up and lift it towards our 12 foot ceilings, set it on top of the banister spinet, and drop it into place where it was easily put into the room However, a year later, when I was moving out the moving crew wasn’t there and trying to figure out how to get that piano lifted up, spun around on top of the banister, and down the stairs with two or three guys with a different issue all together. I still have that piano .

    The story of the floor installation reminds me of the time I have the vinyl flooring that you have to do the templates to cut out the glue down and put the flooring back in place all in one fell swoop where she would be familiar with the right way to do it I was it so we emptied the room peeled up the old floor put the glue down Hadzic piece, cut perfectly shattered in place tapped it down in shut the glue was distributed and will hold it perfectly and then somebody thought it would be a good idea to move the refrigerator back in which isn’t supposed to happen until after the glue has dried for a really long period of time so after the perfect installation was executed the wheels on the refrigerator, left railroad track marks going from the hallway back into its position in the kitchen corner, where it would live with evidence of my not paying attention until we moved

    Lots of instances of moving things where doors had to come off in order to accommodate getting into the room or out of the room. I’ve become pretty good at getting doors off and I had a bookcase that I built without thinking about moving it that was 12 feet long and when I would enlist helpers to move it, they shake their heads and wonder how the hell I ever came up with a piece of furniture 12 feet long.

    Final story is of my dad‘s desk, chef beautiful Cherrywood desk side armoire, but the main body of the desk with the overhead compartments was made of wood so solid that it must weigh 1000 pounds I’m trying to figure out how to get that thing picked up and moved. It’s been a challenge more than once. Right now it’s sitting on a pallet in one of my storage trucks waiting for me to figure out where it will permanently be station once I get permanently station somewhere

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    2. Great piano story. In El Granada (1972, after San Francisco), I found a small upright at a garage sale, and convinced 6 friends (guys) from my hiking group for help me move it in. Had a moving party on a Saturday, fed them rueben sandwiches and beer afterward. Did leave a scratch on a hardwood floor that cost my my deposit eventually…

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  7. I dislike our electric glass topped stove. I would like a gas stove, but we would have to run a gas pipe into the kitchen, and I am not up for any more dry wall work in the basement. We will paint and put new carpet in the basement next year. We will hire guys to move the furniture upstairs into the garage to make things easy for the carpet installers, and the to move everything back into the basement when it is installed.

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      1. Oh good. I wasn’t going to comment on the Mountain Dew, but rather on the empty state of the fridge. An empty fridge is adding to the amount of energy needed to run the fridge. I cringe when I see a fridge with nothing in it.

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        1. Yes. Mine is mostly empty right now. I simply don’t need that much refrigerator space. I feel like I have to eat everything if I fill it up. It’s an expensive Beast to have running in the kitchen with nothing but eggs and a few veggies in it. But I have lost a little weight so that helps. I bought a new dishwasher yesterday due to the motor burning out. The appliance repair guy came and said it would be expensive to repair and not worth it. He will be able to put a new heating element in my dryer though, so I can keep that limping along for a little longer. He has already fixed the washing machine-twice. The stove is good. It’s one of those ceramic top ones. I’m used to it now. I looked at refrigerator prices yesterday and *gulp* I’ll stick with the Beast for a while longer!

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  11. I have stairs that go up a few steps to a small landing, about 4 feet square, and then turn to go up to the second floor. The ceiling hangs over the bottom few steps of the stairs. Bringing a mattress or box spring up to the second floor or down from it involves a lot of “tip the top edge in…now twist it to the left…no, it’s gotta go under, and then up over the post….” It would be nice if you could just hire somebody with a cherry picker and flip the top of the house open and lower your furniture down into the room.

    I shudder to think about replacing the refrigerator. The doors are too narrow for modern refrigerators.

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  14. I remember seeing Britcoms like As Time Goes By, and wondering how they manage with just an under-cabinet refrig. I’ve been reading lately that not everything we refrigerate really needs it – one article was about eggs being just fine without…

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    1. Heck, I can remember not even having a fridge. When I was a kid, we had an ice box. I was about fourteen when we got a small refrigerator. My parents bought their first TV while I was working in Basel; they never had one while I still lived at home.

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