I got home from work and the Wifely Unit made a half snotty comment about her needing to get into the little chest freezer I bought in the middle of the Scamdemic.
The sarcasm was well deserved because while I was out there re-arranging shit a couple weeks ago the top of it had turned into a Catch All for a bunch of empty boxes and some other shit,
On top of that, I had moved a bunch of boxes into the little pathway I kept open to get into the thing also so there was no way she was going to get into it.
So I go out there, move a bunch of shit, flip open the lid and OH MY FUCKING GOD.
Sure as hell, the miserable Chineseium Piece of Shit had died sometime in the not too distant past and everything in it was fucked.
I mean it smelled pretty bad but it must not have been too long ago that it croaked because it could have been much, much worse.
I have experienced that in the past, where it’s so bad that you duct tape the fucker shut, wrap several chains around it to make DAMN SURE it won’t open up and drag the whole shootin’ match out into the Toolies to open it up so it won’t kill people like a Biological Weapon.
Three inches of juice in the bottom and about three hundred Biden Bucks worth of steaks floating in it
Fuck me.
So I opened the garage door, grabbed a box of Yard Debris bags and started in emptying the fucker out.
Of course the very first bag snagged on something trying to get out with it and it trailed a bunch of that funky juice all the way from one end of the garage to the other.
So now I have 3 bags of rotten meat and some really dead Frozen Dinners sitting in the back of my truck and I have the extremely envious job of moving a shit ton of stuff out to make a pathway wide enough to roll that bitch outside some time this weekend.
I’m gonna have to call around and see if my son or a buddy can come help me get the thing into the back of my truck so I can haul it off next week. She said she was sorry she even mentioned in but I told her I was really glad she did!
It could have been so, so much worse and I don’t even want to contemplate just how much worse it could have been.
Of course we then had the obligatory conversation about how you can’t buy any fucking thing worth a damn anymore and swapped stories about the freezers and refrigerators our Parents and Grandparents had.
That meme is 100% spot on true, I bought it in 2022 and it died 2years later.
I distinctly remember the old GE chest freezer my Grandmother had sitting in the back laundry room of her old house that was there for at least forty five years that I know of and was still going strong the day she had to move out so they could tear the place down and park a new Double Wide on the lot.
We have decided that we aren’t going to replace the damn thing at this point, it was something I bought when all the lock down and supply chain bullshit was going on and you couldn’t find one for love nor money.
I caught hell from her for over a year saying we didn’t need it.
Somehow that tune got changed over time and she was using it on a regular basis but at this point I’m not going to run out and get another one.
It’s going to be enough work to get rid of this piece of shit now.
I feel your pain, had a good size freezer crap out in the basement a few years back, what a freaking job.
In ’52 (when I came to exist), there was a little GE upright fridge there from day zero, the kind with a small 1 ft square and about 18 inches deep freezer compartment in the upper right side of the regular fridge part, pretty much only good for ice cubes, Motor and guts were under the main body so the storage space inside was limited, but enough for the family. Remember those aluminum trays that needed a special tool like a crowbar to brake the cubes loose? Yep, best job on a hot summer day.
In any event, it must have been a 1948 model since the parental units has built the house and moved in that year. 50 years on, it was still there, still working. The only thing dad had done was replace the automotive style belt that went from the external motor to the compressor pulley, done ONCE and also replaced the door seal that the parrot had chewed on. Don’t know what GE used for seals on that compressor, but they were damned near eternal.
When dad passed in 2001, it was finally retired to the recycling yard simply because it was not economical to haul it back to where I was. Always wonder if it would still be running today.
Stinky news, straight up sucks. I’ve got 3 freezers in the garage and I keep a temp alarm on all 3, if the temp even gets within 20 degrees of unfreezing the alarms go off…. thereby giving me enough time to either move things around or start planning a neighborhood cook out….
Been there, done that, the memories are painful.
We bought our place here in the Lower Yakima Valley fully furnished including a stand-up freezer and a standard refrigerator in the basement. We still lived in Seattle at the time, so we were gone a fair bit. Sadly for us.
The freezer crapped out with about a half load of frozen goodies about 2 years in. Man, what a stink. I emptied it, contractor bagged up the glop and took that to the dump. I scrubbed and bleached the interior, taped the door shut so nobody could mess with it, set it out in the back alley and had the dump folks haul it off. They appreciated that I’d taped it up instead of removing the door as one would usually do.
We used the fridge as a wine storage place so the temp of the fridge box was set as high as we could get it, about 45 to 50 degrees. Perfect. The upper freezer, chock full of locally grown and butchered pork, beef, and other good stuff was set to freeze hell over.
One fine summer day a year or so later, I come down here after being away for a couple of months, opened the back door and WHAM! The stink! I knew what it was right off. The compressor had FUBARed but the motor still worked. We were thankful the thing did not catch on fire… The temp in the freezer was 100 degrees! Yikes! The liquid slop filled 2 big buckets and went down the drain. The wine was warmer from being shut in the box, but most has been good. I did the cleanup, bleaching, taping and dump run and pickup thing again. Many sailor words were uttered, that I can tell you. Glad I could open the windows.
We got a new stand-up freezer and a chest freezer and both have been good for years. And we live here full time now in the wine capital and hops growing kingdom of the Lower Yakima. Y’all should come visit the Lower Valley!
In the past year, I purchased wireless FREEZER ALARMS from Amazon. They cost about $10.00 apiece. Come in packs of two. Two sender units. Place one in each freezer. And a receiver unit. It has temperature limits you can set. Temp rises above a certain level, the alarm sounds. Also, displays the current temp in each freezer. I have mine on my fridge door. While you are at it, investigate the water alarms you can buy for under your sinks and dishwasher, your washing machine, etc. They all run about $10.00 apiece.
I bought some Kidde combo freeze/water alarms on Amazon that were about $10 each as you said. Went back to check recently and prices were way up, so might need to look for this price at certain times of the year.
Worked with a guy that would buy houses from Sheriff’s auction and fix them up and flip them. Naturally, most of the homes he ended up with were trashed before the owners walked away from them. He told me of one house that his teenage son helped him with. He tasked his kid with taking the fridge out onto the front porch. The kid made the mistake of opening it up to see what might be inside of it. Apparently, the kid lost his lunch over the side of the porch.
I got married in 1970. In ’71, a friend was moving out of his apartment, upstairs of an older lady’s house. We moved in, $100 a month rent.There was a refrigerator in it and he sold it to me for $20. It was probably 25 years old at the time. I bought my house in 1976 and that same refrigerator has been running in the basement since then, without a repair.
Bought a Sears Air conditioner for that apartment. That’s been in my bedroom window since I moved in, also without a repair. 53 years, running every summer.
I guess I’m pretty fortunate.
We’re on our 2nd refrigerator in our kitchen. We gave away the first one cause my wife didn’t like the color. That one is still running in a friends garage.
If you’re still married to that same gal you married in ’70, God bless you both. 50+ years is quite an achievement.
Yesterday was our 37th anniversary, first marriage for both of us. I was 36, she was 35.
And now I’m out of time, so I can’t tell you about my 2 fridges and 1 freezer. Two of them were free, and all are at least 29 years old. Knock wood.
Elmo, How come you don’t send me old logging pics anymore, you give them to Irish and Daily Time Waster and I am left one less truck picture…
I always think of vintage highway trucks when I think of you, and I just haven’t seen many photos of them lately. I shall renew my efforts.
I may have some photos squirreled away on my old computer. I’ll check and see.
Elmo, I have seen in my traipsing through the web not much in pictures of log trucks, though to be forthwith I haven’t searched exclusively for logging trucks. I will have to remedy that.
I don’t do social media but a friend sends pictures of log trucks from Facebook, and a lot of the times those posts will have a lot of other great pictures in the comment thread. That’s where most of my better pictures have come from.
Thanks! Yep, still the same gal. We only dated 1 month before we eloped. Best woman I ever knew.
about 10-12 years ago, I passed on a old round top fridge made about 1950 or so
it weighs like 300 pounds or so. needed a good door seal and maybe a repaint job
but the guts where made out of cast iron. compressor and big ass motor
belt drive too. it was in a machine shop that was closing down. one of the other guys took it home. I bet anything it still working just fine if he got a door seal on it.
still had those old ass ice cube trays in it too.
Always use a surge protector with new appliances. Everything today comes with a damn circuit board and it tends to be the weak link. As others mentioned, freezer and fridge alarms….get in the habit of checking them everyday. Very cheap insurance!
About 5 years ago I bought a (71 year old) 1953 Marquette MagicMatic upright freezer. They were trying to use it with some kind of light foam for a door gasket and could not figure out why so much water drained out of it constantly. I tried ‘splaining it to them but they were from the video game generation and science/physics did not compute.
Took a couple weeks to source some suitable gasket material to make a new one. It pulls down to 25-30 below zero on a setting of four and is so quiet I can’t even hear it running.
Looking for a freezer/fridge gasket? Try https://www.cheyennecountry.net. Very strange website and you need to compare sizes and features of their various offerings but their gasket material is excellent. You might find the same stuff on Amazon if you dig for it. Buy a couple extra feet because you’ll need to practice cutting and gluing those 45° mitered corners.
Everything you buy is SHIT. I just replaced my 30 yr old dishwarsher – installed when the house was built. I should have fixed it hindsight, not loving the new one so much. My LG washer/dryer just took a shit after 14 years. The shaft bearings in the washer motor sounded like a jet in the next room. I spent TWICE the money and bought commercial Speed Queen stuff, made in the USA…only to find out my 33 yr old REAL Maytag’s I gave my daughter are still hammering out the dirty clothes after all these years. Should have axed for those back. Everything is shit.
We have a 1938 GE fridge , monitor top fridge in kitchen. and a 1980 fridge in basement. Really old freezer in barn. NEVER A BLIP…..
BTDT with the stinky goo. Which is why reading about forensic pathology is as close as I want to get to the subject. I still recall my organic chem prof telling us about breakdown amines when things rot: wonderful compounds like “cadaverine” and “putrescine”.
About five years ago now, we came home from a trip to find the old (forty plus) fridge trying to start but not quite able to. Called in a service tech; he found the dead relay in about two minutes, had one in the truck, and spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning up underneath it. He told us “Don’t ever let this one get away. I make a living repairing five year old appliances. This one’s good for the next thirty years now.”
I also got a wi-fi enabled freezer alarm set, but haven’t bothered to install it yet. Yes, it has a phone app that will alert us if the temps start getting too warm………BUT….it’s no good if the power’s out because my wi-fi router will be out too. So what good is that? I suppose I could install a big, honking UPS on the router but that would only be good if the ISP isn’t down too.
The 8.7 Cu Ft chest freezer that my wife and I bought a year after we got married (in ’74) is still keeping on keeping on, even though that poor top is dented and scarred (used as a work surface occasionally…)! Gasket is just fine, thankyewveddymuch!
Frigidare Gallery series.
Sorry, 7.8 Cu Ft..
My grandmother had a chest freezer on the ‘back porch’ (it had been walled in, but it remained ‘the back porch’ to all). I still remember them moving it in when I was little, in 1968. When she sold the house in 2006, I wanted it. We discovered that the lower edge of the shell was rusted away to paper-thinness. It had molded into the floor, but the fucker was still running fine.
I helped do some flood clean-up work on time. Poorer neighborhood, power had been out for several weeks. We were tasked to go in a house, help the owner remove anything that was above the water line (easy to see how high it got based on the stained sheetrock). The cut out the water soaked sheetrock and remove anything below water line and toss in dumpster. The ONE THING they stressed above all else, repeatedly, was “DO NOT OPEN ANY FRIDGE OR FREEZER”. Unfortunately, one teenager couldn’t resist and WHAM, the stench drove us all out of the house. We had to go to the next house and work that instead as no one could go back into that house with the stench.
And yeah, I got three kitchen appliances (stoves, dishwasher) that are less than 3 years old and throwing error codes. The one stove I can fix, but the part is $300 for a stove that only cost $800. Shit. Everything is disposable. By design.