Help, My Freezer Doesn’t Work. Also It Is Not a Freezer

Welcome to the tragic inside of my refrigerator! (Shout out to Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale.) I want to make sure you guys all have front row seats to the latest saga of great banality between me and my landlord, so here goes.

Our refrigerator (pictured) is not so much a refrigerator as it is a tiny vintage collectible that belongs in a museum and not in someone’s kitchen. We knew this when we moved in, our broker mentioned something about us demanding a new fridge but that we might have to pay for it, so we shrugged our shoulders and, dealing with a million other move-in stresses, told ourselves it would be fine.

The fridge itself is tiny but if anything that makes us (ahem, me) clean it out more. But the freezer, the freezer is not a freezer at all. It is in fact called a “CHILLER” and it is located within the refrigerator. It is not its own compartment so much as a little cubby — there’s only one door to the outside, and then a little inner door to get to the freezer cubby, which fills with ice within five minutes of defrosting it, leaving no room for anything beyond a tray of ice and a bag of frozen peas. It also, crucially, does not freeze things, namely ice cream, which is the primary food item you need a freezer for!

You put ice cream in there, and then a half hour later it is that ice cream soup that you sometimes made as a kid, swirling it around in your bowl out of boredom or some acute need to exert power over what was sitting in front of you. Except the ice cream soup isn’t even good because it has little pieces of 60-year-old ice all over the top of it, which have a weird refrigerator taste which try as you might, is hard to ignore even when attempting to chug melted ice cream before your partner gets back from a trip to the grocery store.

I want to be able to place this fridge relic in time for purposes of this article but I am unsure/un-dedicated to the task (update: okay I put the model number into Google and still got nothing). I want to say the fridge is 50 years old, though this could be an exaggeration. According to Wikipedia, “A separate freezer compartment — not located within the larger refrigerator compartment — became the industry standard during the early- to mid-1960s.” I am more than willing to believe we have a ‘70s-era, below-industry-standard fridge in our apartment, but I would also not be surprised if this fridge is from the Second World War and nearing 70 years old. The cabinets built around it leave room for an actual, human-sized fridge, so I also wouldn’t be surprised if when the former building owners moved out, they took their industry-standard fridge and reinstalled something from the basement. THEORIES ABOUND.

Nevertheless, we have lived the life of substandard freezing measures for a long time now. We eat our ice cream immediately, we buy bags of ice for parties, and my smoothies are always middling, filled with browned, half-frozen bananas, like something you’d give a teething baby (that you held a grudge against?). Whenever the landlord asks how things are going, I consider for a second mentioning our non-functioning freezer (the door to the freezer cubby recently broke off, then we super-glued it, then it broke again, after being taken over by ‘chiller’ ice), then I think, “Is it worth it?” No, it is not worth it. This is our cross to bear. *cue Dustin chipping away at ice formations on a Sunday morning with a paint scraper*

But now we have a human baby on the horizon, and for the first six months of its life or so we are all going to live in this railroad apartment, without a freezer, or a dishwasher, or a sink in the bathroom, or you know, distinct ROOMS at all. I can live without these things (famous last words?) temporarily, but I think step one is to get a refrigerator with a freezer that works, so that we can safely store all the milk that will potentially come out of my body.

Of course my first step was to anticipate a battle, so I looked up the rules about replacing appliances in rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. And happily, there are some!

It seems that are options are:

1. Ask for an equivalent used appliance as replacement, one that is clean and not-broken. In this case, we don’t pay anything.
2. Ask for a new appliance, and pay 1/40th of the price in addition to our rent, in perpetuity (i.e., even after the appliance is paid off, you still have to pay that extra $20).
3. Ask if we can just buy the new appliance ourselves, and subtract the cost from our rent. This is appealing, but subject to landlord’s approval.

My first instinct is to take option #1, and then hope he cannot manage to find another WWII fridge. If he can’t find an equivalent, he just has to give us a nicer one without charging us extra. Actually my plan is to initially assume I don’t know these rules, and just ask for a new fridge, without consenting to pay.

If — when? — he asks us to pay for the fridge, we can debate option #2. The other morning we were like, “How much can a fridge be?” Dustin guessed $200. Ha. It turns out the cheapest fridges are $600, and the average costs seems to be about $1000. If the fridge is $600, we’d have to pay $15/month for the rest of the nine months we live here, or $135. I don’t LIKE that, though it’s tolerable. $15 a month sounds negligible, but $135 less so. Plus why should we, renters, be paying for a damn fridge?

I doubt option #3 would ever be something our landlord would consent to, ever, but we could offer it as way to give him some sense of control / choice in the matter. “Or we could buy it and subtract it from our rent?” might suddenly make choosing his own crappy fridge for us seem appealing.

Anyway, I sent my initial email a few days ago and he hasn’t written back.

Hi [landlord],

Hope all is well.

I’m writing because the freezer section of our refrigerator is broken — it has never really worked well, but it has gotten to the point where it doesn’t work at all anymore.

I think our fridge is about 50 years old, so the freezer is very old-fashioned and now fills with ice and the door is broken and doesn’t close. Things like ice cream don’t stay frozen.

It’s not a huge rush but maybe next time you are around you can come by and look at it. Let me know.

Thanks!

I am tempted to edit this to make it sound tougher before I publish it but that would not be journalism! Please note, however, that English is not his first language so I was taking that into account when writing him.

But now I am having doubts. Should I have started out by asking for a new fridge? Addressed the fact that we weren’t willing to pay for it? Should we tell him we’re having a baby? I mean, yes, we have to tell him we’re having a baby but I am trying to prolong that as long as possible in case he finds some tricky way to evict us at the last minute.

In the meantime, we probably need to defrost the freezer so he doesn’t just tell us to defrost our freezer. But then the problem is it immediately re-frosts in the course of a day! It is 75 years old!

Maybe he will simply cheerfully reply to my email, come by the apartment at my convenience, and say, “Oh, Meaghan, why didn’t you tell me sooner?” We’ll all laugh, I’ll tell him we’re having a baby, he’ll pour us a glass of champagne, inspect our apartment for lead paint in a totally professional and thorough manner, and then wheel a new refrigerator/freezer into our apartment.

In my boldest dreams, it comes with an ice-maker.

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