Tag Archives: house

Today I choose to tackle the first part of the garage (TIC00047d)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
September 7 2020

The reorg project has been in full swing for some time, and part of the challenge is the mish-mash of items that are stored in multiple places:

  • Tools like small hammers or screwdrivers in the garage, in the first-floor alcove near the front door, in the basement where I have my desks now, and in the office upstairs;
  • Books in the bedroom, office, basement, Jacob’s bedroom, and even the guest room;
  • My clothes in the bedroom, closet, guest room, and front hall closet;
  • Housewares / camping items in the laundry room storage, main basement, alcove, garage, and basement;
  • Astronomy stuff in the alcove, basement and garage;
  • Sports stuff in the basement and garage;
  • Power tools mainly in the garage, but a couple of smaller items in various parts of the house;
  • Movies in the bedroom, basement, laundry room storage, and first floor;
  • Electrical stuff in the main basement, laundry room storage, and garage;
  • Video game stuff in the laundry room storage, main basement, and first floor;
  • Photo books in the office and bedroom;
  • Games in the office, bedroom, family room, living room, main basement, garage and laundry room storage; and, of course,
  • Papers in almost every place.

In most cases, that mish-mash made some sense on a case-by-case basis. But since I want to do some purging, it’s kind of hard to purge a collection of screwdrivers, for example, if they’re in three different locations. I pretty much have to put everything close to its final resting place before I can do a proper organized purge.

I have frequently called it a domino problem. For example, organizing some of the housewares and camping stuff is a bit painful when it is in at least two different locations, and moving it from one to the other requires me to move a bunch of other stuff out of the way to make room, which in turn means making room somewhere else for THAT set of items. Dominoes.

But paralysis by domino is a poor excuse / rationale for not being organized. And quite frankly, I don’t have the luxury of some of it anymore, not if I’m going to get my office working and organized properly.

I’ve already made a GIANT dent in the office and basement, Andrea has done a lot of stuff in the family room and toys from the basement to the office storage area, and we’re pretty close to being able to say things are all grouped somewhere. Like, “Okay, this is ALL the audio-visual stuff in the house all in one place, what am I keeping and what am I purging?”. It’s still not going to be easy on some of it to decide to get rid as much as I hope to purge, but regardless, if I’m going to finish by the end of September, there are two giant areas left untouched. I need to dig into them just to figure out what’s there even, beyond the general idea I have already. I still have the first-floor alcove and the garage.

Today, Andrea and I tackled the garage. Most of it was going through about 25 small shoebox-sized plastic tubs that had everything from screwdrivers to drillbits, from Allen keys to tape, and from screws to brackets for shelving. Some of it went GREAT. It was easy to see where things went, easy to group them, easy to dispose of some stuff.

Other areas were not so great. Like, for instance, a bunch of things I have for curtain rods. Which I would LOVE to get rid off, but Andrea and I have at least four or five places in the house where we want to change the existing window coverings. So it seems premature to purge curtain rod holders before we know what we’re doing for those locations.

I also haven’t quite figured out what I’m doing with multiple sets of sockets and wrenches that are all jumbled together. Most are labelled well; some are not labelled at all or worn away. I’m tempted to keep the newest and/or best quality set, and ditch the rest. I have this vision of two small tool bags, one in the garage and one in the house, both relatively identical with a good set of each size of screwdriver, for instance.

But as I said, I need all the sets together in one place to then start dividing them up properly. Today was phase 1 of the garage, and we went through two large shelves of small items. It took about two hours and wiped me out. While it didn’t empty large areas of the garage, it was the major parts that take time since we had to open each little box, sort through it, decide what to keep or purge, and even for the purging, seeing if it was something that Andrea could give away on the local “free” Facebook recycling groups or if it was just garbage. Or even if it was garbage, was it e-waste or chemical or recyclable or just plain garbage? A thousand little decisions and it’s exhausting. The electrical work is going to be worse as most of that will be just me going through it, today I had Andrea helping me decide.

The funny thing is it likely looks worse after we were done with lots of piles of things all over the garage on tables here and there.

Phase 2, which I’ll do sometime in the next two weeks, is also going to be a bit brutal. A lot of “big” things to decide if we’re keeping or not. Tarps that we found useful for x or y purpose, but do we need all of them? Some toys of Jacob’s in the garage … do we keep toys for going to the beach to build sandcastles? Which we haven’t used in 5 years probably? Are we keeping all the balls we have looking forward to maybe having a pool next year to play with them in? Or do we purge them now?

And a giant set of questions for me around what I’m doing with my astro gear. I have an option to build a small enclosed parking area in the garage to put a rolling wagon in that would let me haul all my gear to the backyard relatively easily. But if I take that option, I would keep some nails and screws, plus a bunch of wood, AND I’d have to get rid of the workbench. Or I can try to fit it in where there’s a wardrobe now, maybe even using some of the wood from the wardrobe to build the cover. Or do I scrap the covered idea, and then I can get rid of the fasteners AND the extra wood that is there. I am definitely not going to be building any more shelves, and so I have a bunch of shelving that can be purged. Unless, as I said, I build that astro box. Sigh.

25 days left in September, so it will be crunch time.

And these are not the only things left to do, just some big areas on the list that have to get going so I don’t end up having to repeat purging steps.

Today I choose to tackle the first phase of the garage work, with two other phases to go. We (Andrea and I) made good progress, but there’s still a lot to do.

What choices are you making today?

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Today I choose to purge (TIC00043d)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
September 2 2020

As I’ve already posted, I’m in the middle of reorganizing my living space. I’m not in full-scale Marie Kondo mode, nor would I ever follow her insipid advice, but I am going through a lot of stuff with a view to finally getting rid of it.

It feels a bit weird though. Much of it is not “unintentional” clutter, but rather something I intended to do and decided today that as a relative priority, I’m just not going to get to it anytime soon. Take for example some decluttering I was doing in my back laundry room to get to some shelves, which once revealed, are filled with a mix of books and papers that I had set aside for some projects.

For example, I have a very large project in mind for when I retire that deals with government, performance measurement, evaluation, etc. And over the last ten years, I’ve accumulated some docs that I will use when I go to write the book that comes out of that project. Some of it I have electronically, most of it I don’t. I’m keeping those docs, but they can be on the back shelves for the next five years no problem.

By contrast, though, I came across some magazines I had for travel destinations. I know what my long-term travel destinations already are, and if / when I get to do them again, I won’t rely on out-of-date profiles. So those were easy to purge.

I had also previously hung on to some science stuff related to physics and near-astronomy topics, but not quite astronomy. Since my interests have narrowed, the broader stuff doesn’t hold my interest anymore. So it’s easy to jettison it now.

But the one that is probably the least organized and the most annoying are some recipes. I had a bunch of recipes that I clipped for certain purposes, some tried, some not. But the bottom-line is that I have more recipes than I will ever cook in my lifetime, and if I need more, there’s this little invention called the internet that has millions more waiting for me to click and search for them. So those too went the way of the dodo today.

I still have a REALLY long way to go, but it felt good to take a break for half an hour and just go through a shelf or two and simply WEED. Once I’m done weeding, I can put all the performance project stuff together on a single bookcase, ready for my eventual retirement project. I’ll even have other room left over too when I’m done purging all my books, but that’s going to take longer too, now that the Library has stopped accepting any donations to their big sales due to COVID. I think I’m going to start boxing them up anyway as I finish with them and have them “ready to go” for when the Library eventually starts accepting again. The only other viable alternative is regrettably the landfill. (No, please don’t say, “Oh, try blah and blah” unless you yourself have confirmed in the last month that they are taking things. I have tried those places, all of them, pre-COVID, and nobody takes books anymore, even though dozens of people will say, “Of course, you can give them to blah”.)

I have 29 days left in my organizing project for the house and I feel generally “good” about where I am in the process, but I have to keep at it.

Today I choose to purge and declutter.

What choices are you making today?

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Today I choose to brave the wilds of Ikea (TIC00033d)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
August 23 2020

No African safari, no trip to Antarctica. No climbing a mountain. I was going for the extreme adventure today. I went to Ikea.

For those who have heard from those who have braved Ikea during the pandemic, you might have heard that the overall store is indeed open, but if you are going for Click and Collect, you were apparently taking your life into your hands. Reports over the last few months have been that it ranged from an outright sh**-show to chaos made real.

But I’m working on my dream office setup, the desktops came from Ikea originally, I finally found the leg / bases I wanted in another part of the website (spoiler alert: they were NOT listed with “legs”). I already had two desks set up, one with the proper base I like (an inverted I so that the leg is basically in the middle of the side of the desk rather than a leg out at the front to whack my knee on) and one with four annoying legs. I have another use for those, but I had a top with no legs at all, so I splurged and bought two sets of the legs I want.

I ordered them online late last night, and I was thinking I might have them delivered. No, apparently that wasn’t an option for me in “white” legs. They weren’t available locally. Now, this is where I’m confused. If they are IN STOCK at my local store, I don’t really need to have them delivered, I can go pick them up. If they are NOT in stock locally, that seems like an ideal scenario for where delivery might be needed. Or, just taking a flyer here, maybe they could DELIVER them to the local store and I could pick them up there?

Ah, no. Apparently it’s a binary world. If they are at the store, I can have them delivered. If they are at other stores, I can’t. Huh?

Moving on. I notice that they have the same legs in black in stock. Okay, fine, I’ll take those. I do some weird mental math that makes me think I need three sets for awhile before I force my brain to function and note that I already have ONE set. Soooo, for those playing along at home, that’s THREE sets needed minus ONE set I already have. What does that leave us Trigger? One stomp, two stomps. Ah, yes, Two more sets. Very good.

So I ordered them and it asks for my credit card, no problem. Then it says, “Hey we’d like to verify you can use that MC that is IN YOUR NAME, so we want to send a text from PC Financial to your phone”. Umm, okay. Except PC Financial doesn’t HAVE my mobile number. I think they sent it to my home VOIP-line-disguised-as-a-landline. Sigh.

Fine, I’ll pay with PayPal. Same card, no problem. Dolts.

Okay, it’s IN the system. And I’m going for CLICK and COLLECT. I know, I know, I heard the horror stories! But I don’t want to wander around the store collecting boxes!

And they send me an immediate confirmation for 2:00-4:00 Sunday. Hmm…that’s interesting. No place did it ask me when I would like to come. What if I was busy Sunday? What if I was busy 2-4? No matter, who are we kidding, I have no life. But they warn me, “don’t come until we confirm your order is ready!”. Great.

So I got up late this morning, ran some errands with Jacob and Andrea (Jacob to Michael’s for school-like supplies for a course / online camp this week, Andrea to return some stuff in Kanata from an online order). Pita Pit for lunch, and I decided apparently that I needed a Pita Pit enema. I ordered the Western, fully knowing that eggs frequently insist on using the fastlane through my digestive system. Two hours, door to door, so to speak. And just for fun, I risk the Raging Cajun and chipotle sauces. I *expected* to tell them to go light on the sauce, but then I waited in the car with Jacob while Andrea grabbed the food since I had no customization to do, and so I wasn’t there for the admonishment to not kill me. Good news — a Western pita with sauces keeps the fun of a fastlane and adds the wonderful experience of a forest fire all along the tract! Good lord, what was I thinking?

Anyway, back home, playing games, waiting for my email to say “Come now!”. 2:00. 2:30. 3:00. 3:30. Ummm, that window is closing pretty fast. At 3:40, I phone the Ikea number and there are NO options even close to “Where the f*** is my order?” so I end up on a generic hold. At 3:45, I hop in the car and head to Ikea anyway. By 4:00, I’m talking to the woman running the collect area, note that I never received confirmation, and that I’m on hold for status. Since she can check status, I hang up and just deal with her.

Now, admittedly, I’m going in expecting the sh** show that has been heralded for months, and yet it seems strangely calm. They have a single driveway to pull in, and then a very large section of the parking lot set up for parking while you wait, with numbers on the stalls, and spaced every other stall for distancing. I wasn’t in line for the cars yet, and said that I had just parked until I knew if I should get in line. Nope, no worries, just pull around here, park over there, we’ll go get your stuff. Okay. I’m sure it won’t be that easy.

I get set up, I’m playing on my phone. Woman calls from the back of the car to let me know it’s all there. And it is. Very little waiting. In fact, they’re done so fast, I have time to run two other errands on the way home. Apparently ordering after midnight on a Saturday to get stuff end of day Sunday is a good time. I never got confirmation the order was ever ready, but they seemed super well-staffed and surprisingly chipper with still 2 hours to go.

Okay, home, unloaded, dinner, and then the fun began. I had an empty desk top and a set of legs. Should be easy enough, right? Hahaha yeah, that’s funny now to me too. Not.

I get the metal parts together no problem, that’s relatively easy, mildly annoying for one alignment. Then I go to put the metal part on to the underside of the desk and I see that they have completely changed the design from the previous version I have. THAT version was basically universal…you could line it up on ANY tabletop really, or board, and as long as it was thick enough, you could screw in your screws. Great.

This one? Noooo, that style apparently wasn’t good enough. Now they have anchors and plugs, and plastic bolts that go in. Which means the tabletop / desktop has to have HOLES in very specific places to hold the plugs. Which of course my old desk does NOT have.

Sigh.

I suppose I could go over and buy two new desktops to match the legs, but that wasn’t happening. I’d return the legs before I’d do that when I have two perfectly good desktops already. What to do, what to do.

Okay, well, if it was an anchor in a wall, you would drill a pilot hole first and then insert it. Could I drill holes for the plugs? Sure. Relatively easily I guess. I’m not handy, but I have a drill and a good set of drill bits that I inherited from my dad about 25 years ago when he was cleaning out his shed. I marked all the holes, slid the metal over, drilled six anchor holes and put it together. Great. All the anchors work. Of course, there are these other plastic plugs that are supposed to go in too, but they seem deeper than I have space for. Okay, I can get by without those.

There is also a netting thing you’re supposed to install on the bottom so you can tuck cords up out of the way, but it’s in a relatively stupid place and a terrible design, so that ain’t happening. I install four clamps that come with it to hold the wood more strongly to the metal, and with Andrea’s help, carefully invert it to regular orientation. I tested the stability and strength, seems good. We picked it up and I shook it side to side and up and down, no wiggling. It’s solid. Andrea helped me with the height of the desk, putting it at 28.75 inches for my working height (I type directly on it, so it’s a good height for me ergonomically).

One desk complete. So I installed all my computer stuff from work on it, and with a multiple-monitor stand from Amazon that arrived last week, it looks awesome for layout and setup. Way more functional than I had. I even installed my work tablet on a shelf in the middle of it and you would swear they measured it to the mm. It is a VERY encouraging start. And it all started with a decision to risk Ikea today. I’m going to do a “before and after” post later this week, and I’ll have all the photos then. For now, it’s bedtime.

Today I choose to brave the wilds of Ikea, despite all the negative press and commentary I’ve seen about their curbside services. And it was relatively painless compared to the horror stories.

What choices are you making today?

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Bad astro alignment if I don’t listen to myself

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 11 2018

So I posted earlier that my astronomy season has kicked off, and I’m good to go. With the news that Jupiter was in opposition this week (the closest it will come to Earth all year, hence LOOK NOW for your best view), I thought, “Well, yeah, I want to set up”. And because it’s a PLANET, not some dark sky object, I can do it from my backyard.

So on Tuesday, I was in a hurry to set up before Venus disappeared behind a house, and I wanted to show my wife and son, so I set up the scope on our deck. Anyone who knows scopes knows a deck is a bad idea unless it’s cement. Otherwise, they jiggle if anyone walks. Hard to get vibrations out, but whatever. Anyway, got it set up, quick solar system alignment on Venus, good to go, showed the family, all good.

Then I did a quick sky tour, realigned on Procyon and Capella, not bad, and then I started doing a quick sky tour while I waited for Jupiter to come up over a house. Not awesome, but then again, I hadn’t done ANY OF THE PROPER ALIGNMENT THINGS I know I need to do.

Did I put on the vibration suppression pads? No.

Did I set up on actual ground and not a deck that bounces with every move? No.

Did I put in my most accurate time, location, etc.? Nah, general ballpark.

Did I level the scope? Nope.

Did I choose two good stars fairly far apart in the sky with different altitudes? Nope.

Did I do a careful alignment for RIGHT/UP? Yes! I’m not a neanderthal. Well, I mean, I didn’t do the proper doughnut thing to align or use a reticle, I just eyeballed it, but I did do RIGHT/UP at the end.

Gee I can’t imagine why I didn’t have great alignment. If only I had a post where I could refer back and teach myself how to do it correctly. (Best alignment process for the Celestron NexStar 8SE). Stupid lazy git.

Anyway, I really wanted to get to some astrophotography of Jupiter. It wasn’t awesome but I got a white blob. Wasn’t really expecting anything.

But it was promising enough that I started my “new project” anyway. I have my wife’s old iPhone, and everything I’ve read says iPhones tend to focus better on EPs than Android for their camera design, and the best software on the market seems to be Night Cap(ture) which is only available for iOS. So I decided I would repurpose the phone that is sitting unused, basically an iTouch / iPod at this point, and use it as my dedicated astro camera.

I charged it enough to boot and discovered I couldn’t go any further without a SIM card. What? I don’t want it as a phone, why do I need a SIM card???? Dang it. Researched ways to bypass, and while there are lots of sites that say you can do it, one of the FIRST steps they say is to borrow another SIM card. Umm, which part of “I DON’T HAVE A SIM CARD DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”, which is pretty much 75% of the comments on those articles too. Or I could jailbreak it. Or I could find the original SIM card. I called one of the repair places that fixed my tablet, talked to the tech, and he basically said any SIM card for an iPhone should work, and my wife DOES have a new one, soooo…anyway, I tried my Android SIM card first, no joy in Mudville. My wife’s sister had used the phone at one point for a camera on some trip, so she got it working somehow, and it turns out she did have a/the card for it, but well, I was impatient. I popped out my wife’s card from her current iPhone, and guess what? They’re totally different sizes. Great. What the hell. I popped it in, and tried to put it in the card slot anyway. No way this should work. It doesn’t even “fit” in right…smaller than the old one.

And the phone moved to the next step. While I held it in place, it let me activate the phone again, register with the app store, all of it. Then I put the SIM card back in my wife’s phone, rebooted, all good there too. Onward!

Found the app store, connected to wifi, went to NIGHTCAP, tried to download, it needed a code from my wife’s account, annoying but manageable, all good to go. Then it tells me NIGHTCAP requires iOS version 10+. The iPhone 4S? Limited to v.7. No joy in Mudville.

I tried it in the scope on Wednesday night anyway, and the controls seem just too basic with the stock camera app. Can’t change ANY settings. Sigh. Okay, well then. On to the Android phone.

The best app for Android is apparently Camera FV-5. I downloaded it, got set up, mounted the Android phone, played with the layout and setup of the physical adapter to figure out the “best way” to align. I went out to the scope, and couldn’t see anything on the screen.

Now I have a good option for this…often the problem is that the scope isn’t “focused” for that EP, and when you do get set up, you can’t go back to look through the EP as it’s now mounted to the phone. So the easy solution was to pick up two cheap EPs at the same magnitude as the other two I want to use…a 25mm and a 15mm. So I can focus with the first 25mm, get it lined up, and seeing “something”, and in the meantime, I can mount the second 25mm to the phone adapter. When I’m ready to take a pic, I just need to swap EPs in and out. I can do the same at the 15mm level if I ever get that good at the basics.

I couldn’t get ANYTHING to work at 15mm. I switched out to 25mm, and again, I was having no end of challenges to get it lined up in the EP. I’ve done this before with the moon, with no trouble, and even on Tuesday night, I could get SOMETHING. Not last night, not at all. Now, part of it is a challenge figuring out the app settings, mainly around three parts:

  1. White balance — when you do night shots of the sky using your DSLR, most of the astrophotography sites suggest the tungsten setting (good to get rid of fluorescent light normally) as it balances things better. You might have to soften or adjust lighting afterwards, but a good option. Yet I’m not taking a shot of the night sky directly, this is a shot of the EYEPIECE basically. No idea what is the best setting and my tweaks weren’t producing any noticeable improvements.
  2. Light metering — Which option to use for this is almost anyone’s guess…balanced across the image, focused on the dots that are the planets, moons and stars, or something else entirely?
  3. Focus — for DSLRs on the night sky, you generally want it at “infinity” to be in focus for star points. But this isn’t the sky, again, it is of the EYEPIECE that is basically millimetres from the camera. Do you go Auto? Macro? Infinity? As with metering and balance, tweaking wasn’t giving me any better results.

I posted a question on Cloudy Nights in their Astrophotography area, but no guidance yet.

So I said “screw it”, I’ll just do a bunch of visual observing. And hey, maybe I can try out the Ultrablock that is supposed to knock out man-made light pollution. If it does, I have no way of knowing. My alignment was so far off that at one point, I told it to go to Jupiter, and it pointed to a spot where Jupiter had been almost 90 minutes earlier! It had aligned previously, but then I changed something, replaced a star somewhere and obviously screwed up. Because when I told it to go to Jupiter, and it was off, I manually adjusted to Jupiter’s real location and told it to align again. It thought about it for about half a second and said, “Nope, that’s too big an adjustment for me, not going to do it, try again tomorrow, ya lazy git who didn’t bother to follow the right alignment procedure at the start!”. Okay, maybe the wording was something like “unable to adjust”, but that’s what it meant.

Good thing the star party is tomorrow. I need to do some serious observing with the RIGHT alignment process from the start.

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A new addition to our family

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 4 2015

Wow, all those studies were right. Click-bait really does work! 🙂

You came here thinking I was talking about a kid, or a pet, weren’t you? How disappointed are you to know I’m talking about a refrigerator?

When I wrote the blog about the kitchen, I left out “my contribution” to the overall project. Most of the decisions were Andrea’s, including final floor colour, countertops (actually all three of us agreed on that one!), cupboard choices, design for drawers, choice of sink, etc. But from the beginning, I wanted a new fridge.

At night, when I go to make sandwiches for the next day, I was constantly moving three things out of the way to get to what I wanted, constantly shifting leftovers or vegetables to put the lunch containers back in, constantly dealing with the “tight” crunch of the fridge. Totally a first-world-problem, “I have too much stuff in my fridge”, but it was really annoying. We also didn’t have a great place to assemble the lunches, but that was a separate problem to fix with the flow and other stuff being improved with the reno.

So I wanted a larger fridge, or at least one with much improved flow to it.

I also was quite intrigued and interested in the ones that have the water hookups so you can get water, ice cubes, and crushed ice out of the doors. Some of the layouts are terrible, and the mechanical side of things often is painful as the extra features complicate what is pretty simple technology most of the time. But I love crushed ice drinks.

You might think I mean margaritas or something else alcoholic, but I mean things like a Mr. Misty or Arctic Rush or Slushie, although preferably without quite so much rich syrup. I really just like the ice, with water is fine even. I like eating the ice, it freezes my molar area that is often inflamed by my nightly grinding, and the cool nature also relaxes me. Plus it’s water, so counts towards more water per day and doesn’t add calories.

I checked out a bunch of designs, and some of them had water but not cubes or ice. Not sure what the point of that is as there’s a fountain at the sink right behind me, and it isn’t that cold of water. I wanted the crushed ice option, and even passed on a couple of models that only had cubes. I read Consumer Reports, I read reviews, I compared model after model, mostly eliminating ones that were problematic or didn’t have the features I wanted.

In the end, I chose a Samsung model. Now for the sticker shock — this fridge retails normally for $3600. Yep, for a fridge. My father is rolling in his grave somewhere, and my mom is working the rotisserie. Sure, it’s stainless steel which ups the price, but it is still just a fridge. Highly functional, great looking, lots of room, plus the whole ice thing, but still just a fridge. Given the price we were paying for the reno, I didn’t want to scrimp on the fridge as it was, I’m sorry to say, the part that I probably cared about the most after fixing the island with the sink. Fortunately, that fridge regularly goes on “sale” at $3200, and then goes on a real sale to $2200 once every three months. But still. It’s $2K for a fridge. My wife loves me, so we got it.

It was the cause of much angst for the builders. They had never dealt with one so large, I don’t think. They didn’t plan for it very well, even though they had the model, knew exactly what it looked like, but they just didn’t take the doors into account, a bunch of stuff really.

Was it worth it? It’s heaven. The bottom freezer is larger than our old one, and pretty functional. Not perfect, takes a bit of getting used to, but pretty good. Lots of space on the doors in the main part — doors as in plural. Yep, it’s the french door style, opens left and right. I still tend to open both most of the time, but occasionally I can get away with just one. We haven’t completely worked out where everything should go, but the vegetable drawer and meat / deli / eggs drawer are both much bigger than the old one. Not as functional for drink jugs, but workable. And it’s wider – the old one was 28″ wide, this one is a full 36″, and a bit taller. But the big addition is a separate drawer in the middle, as you can see in the picture below. It’s great…lots of room, including for putting lunches once they’re made, along with snacks and things to go with the lunches. It is designed as a separate “zone” — you can set it for a slightly warmer temperature than the fridge so you can keep snacks cool for parties, or keep it the same temp as the fridge, or two settings further to be able to keep fish cold too. We keep it at the same temp as the fridge, but nice to have options.

The fridge is awesome. I love it. I use the ice feature at least once or twice a day, and oddly enough, the cubes are small enough that I don’t even have to use the crushed ice option. I’ve increased my water intake too, which is good. We did NOT go with the option that included a video display unit that ran Android so that you could watch TV, play music, or leave messages for each other. A bridge too far, and was another $800 past the “regular” price. I agree that stainless steel wasn’t necessarily the best option, but they didn’t have it in white.

I give you the newest addition to the family, Will (as in William the Refrigerator Perry, this thing is massive).

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