Fixed refrigerator instead of buying a new one

[nancy33]

Our milk went bad too fast. My husband jumped at the chance to get a fancy new refrigerator. He had today off and I was going to work. I was opposed to buying a new fridge and he was opposed to buying a used one. I threw a thermometer in the fridge on my way out the door and told my husband at least check the actual temp. Later he texted me that he fixed it! He cleaned the coils and something else and the temp went from 46 to 36 degrees!
Another embarrassing thing...we've lived in this house for 4 years. It's a 2 story house and it was always warm upstairs and cold downstairs for those few cold weeks we have in the winter here in CA. To the point that we were using a space heater sometimes downstairs or using the fireplace. Just realized that we could close the heater vents in some rooms and open them in the downstairs room that was cold all the time.  Wow we really missed the boat on that one! Good news is ...we will save on our firewood, electric, and gas bill! We have solar for A/C in the summer.

[Syonyk]

Nice!  Fixing things is awesome.  My daughter isn't quite 4 and already has the "Hey, this is broken, can we try to fix it?" thing worked out.

Our deep freezer's thermostat went out on us a bit after the warranty expired.  I managed to abuse it into running for another week or so until parts came in, then replaced the thermostat.

We also added an alarm - so I can see the freezer temperature now from the outside, and it starts beeping if the temps go too high (15F or so - it normally hovers around 0F).

If you're curious as to what's in a deep freezer thermostat (a little temperature controlled relay), I've torn it apart here, because that's a thing I do: https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/09/freezer-repair-and-thermostat-teardown.html