Fridges: not just a place to keep beers cold anymore

Alas... we come to the next big appliance purchase of our kitchen reno: the fridge.

I want to start off by showing you the fridges I would have, if I could find one to look at in real life before buying one. This my friends is a Smeg.

All so pretty. The reviews online are pretty awful though. And having never seen one in reality, I can't commit myself to one of these :(  Oh and they also cost a mint.. forgot about that part.

So, I am forced into the world of stainless steel firdges. Thankfully, in the last few years, more companies have been producing or selling tall skinny Euro-style fridges in Canada. They say it is for the condo market. Well I say it's for the tiny-1950's-kitchen-that-didn't-have-room-for-a-dishwarer market. Hey that's me! Yay!

I've looked at all the tall skinny fridges that as available to me. There are suprisingly a lot of different features out there. The lower end models looked decent but have terrible lighting, or crappy cheap plastic interiors and crispers. This would include the LG and Moffat models.

Next are the mid range appliances, which for our purposes all are around $2000. This would include my beloved Smeg. The following companies all make small fridges: Bosch, Kitchen Aid, Fisher & Paykel, Whirlpool, etc etc etc. There are some higher end fridges (Liebherr, sub zero, and some others) as well as fully built in models but I don't have 10 grand to spend on a fridge.

After some deliberation, and after finding a certain fridge on clearance (hello floor model!) we decided to NOT buy the great deal, floor model fridge for once. We are going to buy a Fisher & Paykel one. It seems like a very well made unit, the inside has a lot of great features, it is actually 15 cubic feet instead of 11.3 which most of the smaller ones are... it has a gorgeous handle which is of course important for aesthetic purposes. It is also on sale, so yay!

Here is our new fridge, that we haven't actually bought yet:

Look at the inside!

Here it is in someones house:

Isn't it so tall and majestic??

I think so :)

Ikea Kitchen Planner

Three words:

I.
Love.
You.



Seriously.

You make my life so much easier... I can change you around easily. I can play with features, and get a running total while I go!

Greg and I have finally finished up the cabinet choices. Next week we will go to Ikea, and talk yo one of the kitchen people to make sure we have done everything right. And then we will be ordering our cabinets.


AAAAAHHHHH

This is kind of scary.....

Here is a picture of our kitchen to be! It doesnt have the counters on it or appliances because those things are coming from other places.

OMG OMG OMG I can't wait..... even though I am totally nervous.

Note: the tiles are not how we are doing them. There are like 3 choices for how tall you want to put your pretend tiles on the wall. Also that left corner is going to have shelves, and they are going to be awesome. 

New Oven!

Well, there is something to be said about appliance shopping. The things I might say about it are not suitable for print. Having the Ikea Nutid slide in range in mind at the low price of $1200, yes I sad low price, I actually looked omline to read reviews. let's just say, they were less than favourable.

I try to keep in mind that most people who write reviews are either blown away by awesomeness, or experiencing a total suck fest. Ikea's appliances seem to represent more of the latter.

I had pinned a bunch of awesome looking slide in electric ranges to Pintrest and then went forth to read the reviews. Most were horrible. It seems that electronics die in ovens a lot these days. This is disheartening!

There were a few though that had good reviews, and were reviewed by people but also companies. So these are the stoves I did further research into. I went to the lovely store Corbeil Appliances not far from my house, and took a look at these stoves in real life.

One stove really stood out: The Samsung 30' Slide in range. It was pretty. It was functional. There was even a model that turns into a double oven! Yes! A single oven can be a double oven.

And because I am a girl who likes a good deal, though the double oven version was on sale it was still $2000 (!!!) we bought the floor model of the version one step down from that. It still cost us more than we had budgeted but I think we got a pretty amazing range at a pretty good price!

It gets delivered April 4. We haven't started doing anything in our kitchen yet... this could be fun....