mrshl | blog

My solution for the ailing economy? Buy more stuff.

Yep. Jordan and I made two major purchases yesterday: a new fridge and a new TV.

Friday I came home to a pleasant, post-Ike surprise. Even though I wasn’t scheduled to get power back until late the next week, the kind folks at Centerpoint had managed to restore electricity to our house.

Unfortunately, the lengthy layoff without power turned our refrigerator into a giant (somewhat stinky) paperweight. Or it could have been a power surge. Either way the fridge was only blowing hot air. It was shot.  The fridge had come with our house, and it certainly wasn’t a model we would have purchased. So our choice was to pay $500-600 to repair it or buy a fridge that we actually liked. We chose the latter.

We ended up getting this model from Sears, which is pretty much identical to a Kitchen-Aid fridge Jordan’s folks have. We like it because it features an internal filtered water dispenser, without taking up all the shelf-space. Plus, I’ve read that lower-freezer units with top shelf ice-dispensers tend to have a lot of technical problems. Neither Jordan nor I are big ice people, so we were fine with keeping the ice in the freezer drawer.

We also bought a TV. Unlike the fridge, our flat screen purchase was planned for quite a while. We had initially set our sights on one of the high-end Samsung sets that had 120hz processing. But, we were turned off by Samsung’s Touch of Color (ToC) design because, frankly, we don’t want a red TV.

But after a lot of research, we decided we still preferred the Samsung picture to any other LCD on the market, so we bought the entry level Samsung LN46A550. It has the same great picture as the high-end Samsung sets, but at a fraction of the cost of most other flat 46” flat screens. This set was $1299 at Fry’s, and Sears matched the price plus gave us 10% of the difference. Plus we got 1 year of no payments and no interest.

So we dropped a crapload of money at Sears, but we got two solid appliances. We enjoyed our new TV all weekend, and on Friday we’re getting the new fridge. That’s good because I’m already tired of storing things in an ice chest.