Not having a fridge is serious stuff. You either live out of a cooler (after a weekend of this, everything smells and tastes like onion and kielbasa, trust me) or you scramble to find a fridge replacement, and quick!
We had several options to solve our fridge dilemma:
Buy a plug-in cooler that acts like a teeny fridge. Pro: I can re-use it many times while travelling to dance competitions.
Con: It would cost us about $150 and we'd still need to cast about for a more permanent fridge solution at the cottage.
Pro: Cheap.
Con: We have no idea how long this "new" fridge would last or what its history is, and we might end up replacing it again in a year. No warranty. Annually hauling fridges out to the cottage by boat is something I'd prefer to avoid.
Pro: We may get 10-15 years out of it. It has a warranty. The history of the appliance is known.
Con: More expensive. Still have to face getting the old fridge off the island and getting the new one out there. For some silly reason, stores don't deliver appliances to islands!? (Kuh. Some people's kids.)
Around this same time I spotted a deal on a new fridge for $400 at Sears, but the sale ended the same day I found it. After a flurry of panicked research, we came to the conclusion that there are other $400 fridges out there, so we didn't jump on that deal.
Last Thursday we headed over to Lowe's to shop for some cottage-y stuff, and to see if they had any worthwhile fridges in their clearance/scratch-n-dent section. They did not. However, they DID have an 18.2 cu.ft. fridge for $500, and it was 15% off!
"That's not a bad deal," I thought at the time. The captain wanted to think about it a bit more, so we went on our merry way.
That night he got to searching. He was sure he had seen that same fridge elsewhere when we conducted the flurry of research over the Sears fridge. In true Captain-O'-Cheap form, he figured if he could find it for less somewhere else, he could get Lowe's to price match and get a better deal! cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap
As luck would have it, he found a better deal at The Brick. The Captain knew that, at Lowe's, their price match policy was to match the competitor's price and give an additional 15% off. What he didn't know was that they applied that additional 15% discount to the matched price of the fridge! Most stores will give you the difference in price plus a percentage of the difference, not a percentage of the total cost of the item. Sweet! An even better deal. He ended up getting the $500 fridge for $343 plus tax, and he was very pleased with himself. There was much chortling.
Delivery (if they'd even take it to the marina for us!?) was going to be $75. He decided not to pay for delivery. The next day he rented a 4'x7' U-Haul trailer for $15/day to transport it himself. Did I mention it was pouring rain? It was pouring rain. When he got to the store to collect the fridge, it had no packing box to go with it. He complained that he had to transport it, in the rain, and it had no carton to protect it. So they offered him an additional 5% off. And the captain chortled a little inside. That brought the price of the fridge down to $326 (+tax).
He loaded his insanely-good-deal fridge into the trailer (which fit perfectly) and we packed up to head to the cottage.
I'll save the fridge relocation for another post, as this is now a very long tale.
Is he not, truly, the Captain O' Cheap? As my Mum often says, "With him around, dear, you'll never die poor."
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