Refrigerator advice needed! Cabinet depth vs. regular depth.
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Hey Sue our house's kitchen was built around a 48" cabinet-depth fridge SubZero.The SubZero was 10-years-old when we bought it and was just a piece of junk. The freezer would just stop for days at a time... We finally just decided to replace it, since no repair guy could really fix it for good. But I was in shock at how expensive a replacement was -- from any brand. We ended up going with the cheapest 48" cabinet-depth out there, by GE, but it's still much more expensive than a regular fridge. To make matters worse, we've had some repair problems with the fridge, leading me to buy an extended warranty as well. A couple different repair guys commented that all the fancy big shallow fridges have reliability problems.. not sure about that, but I'll say we never had a problem before with our old "simple" fridges. Also, even though it's 48" wide, it's just not as big as you'd imagine because it's shallow. So all in all, I don't think it's worth it if budget/hassle is a concern.
Go for the shorter depth. Things get lost in the back in deeper formats, and the deeper refrigerators are harder to clean, too. The cost differential is not that great -- at least no when you amortize it over the life of a well-maintained refrigerator. My two cents.
Hi Sue,We're also doing a kitchen starting in January and I've been going through the same considerations. I decided on a regular depth refrigerator, although I need to add that we have space to build out behind it so that it'll appear cabinet depth and won't stick out. But I would do the regular depth even if that weren't the case. These days, you can find a well-priced refrigerator that is deep but the shelves slide out, so the issues of reaching things or cleaning kinda goes away, imo. Good luck!
Sue, how much capacity do you need? There are affordable cabinet-depth (24") refrigerators with reasonable overall dimensions. Our reasonably priced Kitchen Aid is about 36" wide, 72" tall and has about 25 cu. ft. of capacity.Yes, the huge cabinet-depth models like Roy's are expensive but you may not need that kind of volume. Last time I looked in Roy's I was amazed by all the stuff in there. They had about 40 pounds of fresh fish, one caribou head, two mustard bottles and 4 cases of Coors Light - let's vent!
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