1. Have your brand new wine fridge deboxed in your driveway and hauled up five steps, through a hallway and into your dining room by two delivery men.
2. Admire said wine fridge until your husband gets home, pour a glass of wine to pass the time.



3. Wait 48 hours until you can plug it in, something about the coolant having to settle. Be slightly annoyed.
4. Spend 20 minutes comparing carpet coaster sizes in Target in order to raise the fridge a quarter of an inch so the door doesn’t scrape the carpeting.
5. Thank God that your husband suggested via text message getting two per foot so you don’t have to go back to Target to buy more.
6. Unpack the extra shelves and discuss how much space is needed between the shelves to optimize sliding feature and visual uniformity.
7. Make a lemonade martini for each of you.
8. Install shelves.
9. Watch husband load the wine fridge using some classification system but as long as you know where the reds are, it doesn’t really matter.
10. Plug in wine fridge. (finally)
11. Follow the instructions to the letter and watch as the display alternately blinks “od” and the current temperature at you.
12. Search google for an explanation for this, come up empty.
13. After several minutes, rejoice that the wine fridge suddenly seems to get the message, stops blinking and starts cooling. Hooray!
14. Eight hours later, enjoy your perfectly chilled bottle of wine. :)

Or, A Cautionary Tale About Repairing Your Own Wine Fridge

Our 50-bottle wine fridge has been out of commission for several weeks. It makes a god-awful noise when it’s plugged in and the cooling feature is non-existent. Basically, it’s currently a glorified wine cabinet.

To see if we could diagnose the problem, we pulled the unit out of it’s snug little area for better access to the back. Upon doing so, Eric discovered that the fan unit was entirely coated in dust. Embarrassed that this could be the problem, I tackled the fan with the vacuum, then got the brilliant idea of taking the fan out to clean the blades with a damp paper towel. Except, the screws wouldn’t go back in properly and what the heck are those tiny silver nuts doing on the floor, oh.

(Eric is either rolling his eyes or strangling me at this point of the story. Or both)

And did I mention that the motor on our vacuum cleaner choose this exact moment to die? Yeah.

So after some creative maneuvering with a flashlight and a tiny screwdriver we managed to secure the bottom part of the fan back in place. We plugged in the wine fridge and (amazingly) there were no rattling or groaning noises!

We went to bed praying that when we woke up, the unit would be at a lovely (and quiet) 58 degrees.

Well, the unit is not maintaining a cool 58 degrees and it sounds like it’s being slowly tortured to death. It’s not the fan, so I’m afraid it may be the motor which means we needed to decide if it’s worth spending (enter some obscene amount of money here) to fix a seven year old wine fridge.

Turns out no one will even give us a chance to spend money to fix it because I’ve called eight places with no luck: one made an appointment with me and never showed up, four didn’t deal with wine fridges at all, one never called me back after I left two messages, one said he would come look at it but couldn’t do anything if it was one of three (likely) problems and one guy was just plain weird.

So, as of now, we are wine-fridge-less. :(