When Fridges Attack

If all goes as planned, my roommate and I will be cleaning out the fridge tomorrow. It's kind of one of the last big annoying tasks we have to accomplish in the process of making the house a clean(erish) place to live. We've been kind of planning on it for weeks now, so we've been careful about not adding a lot of extra stuff into it. Less stuff means less crap to deal with when we clean it. While the fridge is dirty, I'm not really that concerned about it. It's less horrible than other refrigerators I've dealt with before.

For one thing, it has solid surface shelves. We can pull them out, wipe them down, and replace them will little to no hassle. The fridge in the last house had wire shelves. If you've ever cleaned the wire shelves of refrigerator, when you have a chance to get a new one, you certainly don't choose wire shelves again. They really suck and they get so damned filthy. Every little section of them has potential for grossness. And you have to clean all of the little spaces.

When I was in college, the fridge in our rent house leaked water into the bottom of itself. There was the constant pool of disgusting wetness, usually rocking some unholy color. We'd clean it . . . well, when we were of the mind to do so. This wasn't too often. It was the 90's and college. Most of the time, we'd open it, look at the puddle of nasty, and just let it drift from our minds. This meant once we did clean it, it was pretty horrible.

Even the fridge I'll be cleaning tomorrow isn't as bad as it used to be.  My grandmother had a habit of keeping food items inside of it well past their expiration date. It has a lot of depth to it, so the deeper you go in, the more weird and disgusting shit you would find. It was usually growing hair and sometimes it would even speak to you.  That last part might have been some hallucination brought on by whatever spores were growing back there.

As my roommate and I both suffer some minor PTSD due to scary refrigerator monsters, we try to keep ours as free of potential breeding grounds as possible. When things get too old, they get tossed with no drama or special event. That way it's easier when we need to empty the thing and nothing in there is trying to form its own independent nation.

One of the things I'm coming to accept about this whole cleaning thing is that a lot of little steps really make the bigger steps easier. A lot of wise decisions, easy to follow rules, and willingness to take a minute or so to clear some stuff out of your way can make the whole process of house cleaning less of a hellish jacked up mess. You can't always choose your fridge, but if you get the chance, make sure that *easy to clean" is on your list of criteria for it. Make sure your fridge is in good working order.  Most importantly, take a few minutes to clear out the old stuff. In the long run, you'll thank yourself for all of this.