I Love Craigslist!

As you probably know, we’re trying to renovate our house on the cheap, reusing materials and doing it as “green” as possible – Craigslist has been an integral part of that. So far we’ve found the perfect set of cabinets for our kitchen, our lovely new (to us) wood stove, a low flush toilet, a cabinet for our living room, a cozy chair for sitting by the fire, and this weekend brought us one of the best deals of all – a new fridge!
Our appliances were put into the kitchen when it was last renovated in 1971. The oven won’t accept a regular sized cookie sheet and swings between 75 and 200 degrees over what it’s supposed to be. The fridge was a small 11 cu. ft. model with a door that didn’t seal properly, and a shelf that spilled its contents all over the floor if the door was pulled open too quickly. This in addition to the fact that despite its small size, it used 2-3 times more electricity to run than a modern fridge twice as big.

Long story short, we needed a new one and were lucky enough to find this year and a half old refrigerator on Craigslist for $50! Why was it so cheap, you ask? I’m not exactly sure. The fridge handle was broken, but a quick call to the company got us a new one for free under warranty. It was very clean and looked like it had hardly been used, but apparently it didn’t fit into their new kitchen and they wanted it out, which was very fortuitous for us.
You can see in the photo that with 18 cu. ft. of storage at our disposal, the fridge is still pretty packed, but we’re loving the extra space (well, chances are it’s only me, but that’s enough)!

Edited on February 4/2007 to add: In light of the other great refrigerator photos that I’ve seen with detailed descriptions of their contents (see this post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), I thought I’d add a little more about the contents of our fridge here (for those of you who have stuck with the topic this long!) instead of posting the photo a second time.
The top shelf holds the requisite apple juice and milk (for the kids), a carton of buttermilk that my mom gave me to use up when she left for 2 weeks of holiday, a pitcher of homemade soy milk (in the very middle), a half jar of blueberry apple sauce, my favorite Bragg’s Liquid aminos (which I use like regular soy sauce), and a bouquet of cilantro (my favorite way of keeping it fresh is in a glass of water with a plastic bag over top – it keeps for weeks).
Lower down, there’s pumpkin puree thawing for a batch of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins that a friend recently gave me the recipe for, leftover creamy corn chowder that I made for lunch the other day, and Dijon mustard for vinaigrette.
The lower shelf holds assorted jars of jam, peanut/hemp seed butter, and kalamata olives (for pasta Puttanesca). The mixed bean sprouts and feta cheese go in very our favorite salad. In the top drawer, there’s Jerseyland organic parmesan cheese, Gimme Lean “sausage style” (great for veggie “meatballs”), and Yves veggie ground round.
Seriously lacking at the time this photo was taken are fruits and veggies, which is because it was snapped the day before our grocery delivery arrived, and most of our fruit these days comes from the 60 or so pounds of apples that we have left stored in the garage from this fall.

There, now you know way more about our eating habits than you probably ever wanted to!   : )