The refrigerator and resisting planned obsolescence

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Whenever I go away for more than a few days I come home to find something broken. The cable over the spring-loaded pulley that allows the garage door to open and close somehow tangled itself up in my absence, so the door was stuck. The storm door was missing a pane of glass, maybe attacked by the wind or an errant stone. A hinge had fallen off a cupboard door. The water faucet in the bathroom sink dripped. Or the bathtub faucet. Or the kitchen faucet. The drain in the basement was clogged and the floor covered in several inches of water. I turned the oven on and the element made a noise like pfs-zzt and went dead. Do these domestic objects miss me when I’m gone? Do they, as we all do, long for loving attention?

Returning home from a trip a few years ago, I opened the refrigerator door and it flew away, both hinges having come undone in my absence so that it was held in place only by the magnetic insulating seals. I picked up the door along with everything that had flown out, turned off the refrigerator, emptied it, and began figuring out how to put things back together.

The refrigerator is a Danish model we bought 30 years ago. It’s tall and narrow with the upper two-thirds serving as the refrigerator and the lower third, the freezer. No bending over for things in the fridge, which is convenient. But the feature that really convinced us to buy it was dual compressors — one for the fridge and one for the freezer — which meant that the refrigerator-freezer unit would use less electricity, maintain more precise temperature control, and last longer than a similar unit with a single compressor.

Aside from the flying door, there is one other small problem — all the interior trays and compartments along with the handles to both the freezer and fridge are made of plastic. The lower tray inside the refrigerator door cracked first along both ends. The tray hung precariously out in space, bottles and jars leaning forward as if ready to launch themselves off a cliff and into the abyss below — the kitchen floor.

I slathered low-temperature glue along the broken edges of plastic then drilled small holes on either side of the split section and sewed the tray’s severed parts together using very light gauge woven wire. That worked for a good long time until the tray cracked in another spot. This time I drilled through the inside of the door and tray and wired the hanging section of tray to the door itself. It works great although it looks a bit like the stitching on Frankenstein’s forehead.

Then one day as I opened the fridge, the shiny white plastic door handle split much as the interior tray had — vertically from top to midway down its length. And on my return from my last trip — an entire month away — the freezer door handle split just as the fridge door handle had. I would have to make new handles for both doors. 

I went through my scrap lumber pile and found a relatively clean, smooth three-foot-long length of 1-by-4 finish-grade pine. To avoid possible splitting from the ends as I worked the wood, I drew a paper pattern of the handles and traced it in the center of the board’s length. Then came drawing, carving, cutting, drilling, sanding and oiling the wooden replacement handles. It’s the interior cut that’s the hardest. It took me several hours for each handle using my clumsy tools — a hand brace and bit that was my father’s, several chisels of various sizes, a hacksaw, and an electric drill, circular saw, and sander.

Perhaps you are wondering why I didn’t avoid all this home manufacturing and simply buy a replacement plastic tray and door handles. I’m guessing you know why. These parts are no longer available. You can’t buy the five-dollar tray or the seven-dollar molded plastic handles that allow you to open and close the doors of your $1,500 energy-efficient and long-lasting, dual-compressor refrigerator freezer. For 30 years, this faithful domestic servant has stood as a sentinel in our kitchen. Sewing up the tray and making wooden handles seemed the least I could do to show my gratitude. Little gifts to honor a machine that has served us so well and doesn’t deserve to be thrown away as just another victim of planned obsolescence.