My Husband the Handyman

Recently our Whirlpool refrigerator/freezer ice maker started making a column of ice from one corner of the ice maker. This column of ice would attach itself from the bottom of the tray to the ice cubes below. Now generally this would not be a problem (I kept breaking off the column) except for two things. The ice column would clump the ice cubes below and thereby not let any cubes into the chamber for release and the column of ice was brownish and had a grit in it. Now how did grit get into the water? So I thought maybe it was time for a new water filter. Got the filter, put it in, then something curious happened. The ice maker stopped working of course. Now why would the ice maker breakdown? The refrigerator is less than 6 years old which by today's standard would mean it's ancient. My husband's parents gold Kenmore lasted 20 years, granted it's ice making capacity was a little tired and sluggish, but it still worked and made ice. My whole family groaned as the ice maker came to a complete halt. My daughter said in a confused stated, "Now what are we going to do?" "Are we going to have to live like hobos? (her favorite word for poor people) as I pull out the plastic ice cube trays from storage. It's probably time to buy a new refrigerator because the plastic veggie bin drawer has been broken for two years (we buy a lot of produce) and now the ice maker is caput I'm thinking. We make a trip to the local R.C. Willey's, on Saturday's its free hot dogs and soda-hey it's free lunch and you don't have to buy anything and check out the prices of new fridges. Of course the one I want cost over $2500.00 with the new French Doors and bottom freezer. Anything with the word French in it will spiral the price upwards. I go home depressed. Maybe we can live without ice making capabilities. Nothing wrong with making ice, my mother did it, my grandmother did it, well maybe she didn't, she's was old world Italian. Well heck, at least we don't have to keep our ice in a block in the ice shed like "Little House on the Prairie". My husband complains that the ice from the trays are too big for the water bottles. I tell him put the cubes in a plastic bag and crush them with a mallet, he's looking at me like I'm crazy. This of course sent him over the edge to try to fix this problem. Now let me tell you, my husband never has nor will be a handyman, it's like he has two left hands and no functioning logic, you know, use a hammer when it calls for a screwdriver. Me, I have more testosterone than my male chihuahua, so I am more capable of figuring out things and I semi-read the directions and I'm Asian. This past week he went on a crusade to fix our ice maker. He called several appliance repair places which tell him the fix will probably cost over $300.00. That tears it! We need to buy a new fridge! He finally talks to one nice appliance guy that tells him that it's the ice unit which is an easy fix and only involves three screws. That excites him! Only three screws he chants! The appliance guy tells him the part cost less than $100.00 and can easily be installed himself. I'm thinking nothing is that easy. He finds the part in town (which is considerably less expensive that ordering it from Whirlpool), we drive to the other side of town, which my daughter exclaims, it this hobotown? We go into the appliance store, I'm still doubtful. There are parakeets flying around and chirping. I ask the guy is this the problem with our ice maker? He's like, look lady, if I knew that, I would be a millionaire. We buy the part, never mind there are signs all over the store screaming, NO REFUNDS! My husband wants to take the part home immediately, no stops at our local Target store for our weekly stop. He takes his prize in the house and quickly starts to work on installing it. For myself, I remain calm, because I know later, I will be screaming that we just blew $100.00 for a wrong part and we need to buy the French door refrigerator, never mind that it will now cost $2600.00! He holds the part in, but his hands are too big to get the tiny screws in the holes, he claims they aren't a match. Oh boy, here we go. I go in, patience still in tack. I place the screw in the hole, he screws it in. After it is in place all three screws home, he says I hope I put in the wire plug in good enough. Great! why would you think that after the thing was all screwed in? We shut the freezer and say our novenas. An hour later we peek. No ice, but some suspicious brown residue at the bottom of the bin. We pull the bin out, my husband says he wiped out the bottom of it (you know husband style cleaning), we rinse it again, by this time I'm thinking maybe we should have rinsed out the ice maker too, you know all that storage dust and all. We carefully place back the bin, I place my finger in the ice maker, it feels like there's ice there, or maybe it's just cold. We shut the door. I tell my husband, I haven't heard the water run through the ice maker and right when I said that, we heard a clunk in the freezer. I wouldn't have registered it, except my husband ran to the freezer and screamed, "We have ice!" I rush with disbelief and peer into the bin, yep, sure enough there's ice at the bottom. Maybe it was a fluke, couldn't possibly be that easy! Hours later and ice is being make a record speed, my husband's chest is puffed up like some sort of pigeon doing his happy dance. I fixed it, I fixed it! He jumps up and down like a seven year old! Boy am I never going to hear the end of it. My daughter is just happy we're normal again, not hobos. Myself, a little relieved, a little disappointed I'm not getting that French door refrigerator and in the background I could hear my husband on the phone to the appliance store-hey do you have a vegetable bin for a Whirlpool?-