It’s just been about a week since I heard a loud air compressor-like noise for a few seconds. But it wasn’t until the next day that we noticed water dripping out of the ice dispenser of our fridge. Then it took another couple of hours to discover and piece the evidence together:

• ice cubes melting in dispenser
• new ice not being made
• Ziplock of peeled bananas in freezer are mushy
• LG’s Smart Diagnosis feature on its app telling us the fridge is working just fine

Since I’m making lists, here are the benefits of living without a fridge:

• it’s like camping, but while sleeping in your bed in your heated house!
• your kitchen feels SO MUCH LARGER without a fridge!
• you get to audit your condiment hoarding and toss most of them out for being expired

In reality, we’ve been missing the filtered water and ice dispenser more than the fridge itself. We’ve got one little beer fridge, the Igloo fridge/freezer from my cross-country camping adventure last year, and two coolers sitting outside now. And everything savable from the freezer went to the garage chest freezers.

Part of choosing to live in such an inconvenient location means we can’t just replace a dead fridge with a new one on the same day. Or even the next.

But today the new one should arrive!

Choosing a new fridge is tricky. We had a beautiful, enormous LG fridge. But found out how they are prone to early compressor failure with no warning. They’ve even had a couple class action lawsuits about them. And they aren’t something you can replace without a qualified service technician. None of which exist up here.

So we looked at every other brand that we could get shipped up. And the reviews are just terrible.

In the end, we bought a newer model of the exact same LG fridge we had before. It worked perfectly, until the moment it died, after all. The advice online was to buy something simple, with older compressor technology. But the ice dispenser! And the filtered water! There’s just no finer luxury, is there? We can’t go back to a Brita jug.

Because everything is always damaged in shipping up here, we’ve saved all the parts of the old fridge (our back door is too narrow for our fridge selection, so the doors have to come completely off to get it in and out of the house) in case we need to pilfer parts. I strongly dislike stainless steel, but that’s the one they had in stock at the Brick in Whitehorse, so that’s what we’re getting. It will probably look exactly the same as the old one so we won’t even notice the difference. (Otherwise, I’d probably go back to a white fridge – bright, easy to clean, timeless – but oh well.)

And now we sit and wait for the freight delivery truck…