Things Falling Apart

   Last Saturday, I opened the freezer door and saw that all the ice cubes had melted. Thinking that I had not fully closed the freezer door I emptied the water out into the sink and closed the door securely. A few hours later I opened the door again. I realized that it was cool, but not cold and that  other things had thawed. Something was wrong.
  I alerted C. We moved all the freezer items to the chest freezer downstairs which was working just fine. Then we turned out attention to the refrigerator. All we could hear was the fan running. No compressor. It was broken.
  Since it was still cool we left things in there, taking care not to open it unless we had to. Meanwhile we figured out how we going to store all the things in the refrigerator. These are times when it is good to live in Minnesota in the late winter. It was still hovering around 40 degrees. We could keep things in the garage and also in the small unheated mudroom by the front door. We were going to be fine.
  We boxed up the food and put it in the garage. We were relived. We were not going to lose anything.
  Unfortunately we were going to have to wait until Monday to shop for a new fridge. We managed through Sunday. It was inconvenient, but it would have been much worse if it had been late spring or even summer. I was not going to complain.
  Monday we shopped. Refrigerators are expensive. We found one at a local shop. We would get it the next day. Perfect. We went home, relieved.
  The next morning the new fridge arrived. The old one was hauled out. I quickly cleaned the floor underneath so the new fridge would have a clean place to sit. Most of it was cat hair and some rust. Once it was as clean as I could get it, the new fridge was moved in.
  Right away we discovered one small problem. The new fridge is deeper than our old one and the door hit on the edge of the counter. We would not be able to open the door past a 90 degree angle to the fridge.  he meant that we would be unable to get one of the vegetable drawers out for cleaning. Also it didn't have a cheese and deli drawer like out last one. We put the open packages of cheese in a food storage box. We'd figure out how to deal with the vegetable drawer later.
   I went under the sink for something and saw that there was standing water under the sink. We knew there was a leak in the faucet handle that we were waiting to repair. There was another leak under the sink that we had not caught. The meant that the faucet needed to be replaced. That's not hard, except for one thing. Both the hot and cold water shut off valves under the sink didn't work and  also needed to be replaced. We needed a plumber.
  C called a couple people and finally got our son-in-law, Rick, to help. Rick is a carpenter by trade, but also knows how to do some simple plumbing jobs. Since our old faucet was old and rusted in, he had to saw it apart to get the new faucet in place.
  During the faucet installation, Rick broke through some rotted wood under the sink. Another thing that would need repair. He loaned us a small fan to dry the wood under the sink once the faucet was in.
  That wasn't all. When he and C went downstairs to turn the water in the house back on, one of the pipes near the water meter started to leak. It was a slow leak, but another thing that needed fixing. They put a bucket under it.
  C got on the phone with a friend of his who knows plumbing. He got information on how to fix the water meter leak. The fan was doing a nice job of drying out the area under the sink. The new faucet worked perfectly.
   It's nice to know we were able to take care of all these things that are falling apart. However, I hope everything else will stay together for a bit longer.