Hi,

Ouch!

We had a house built and also had the same problem. No magic solution
I am afraid. In the end we went for a Counter Dept fridge at about $US
3,000 - ish. It was a while back.

Even though we had an architech design the house. The only way I think
to effectively have a "Standard" fridge is to have a closet, or some
nich in an adjoining room that you can push the fridge into. Most
cabinets are 24 inch in dept. Most counter dept fridges are 27 inches.
The extra 3 inches is O.K. What you see is just the doors coming out,
the body is flush. You need to have the doors sticking a bit out
anyway because otherwise you would need a gap on each side of the
fridge to allow for door swing clearance. Difficult to explain, but
the corners of the doors when used will push out sideways maybe 1/2 to
and inch when you open them.

There are fridges that are 100% flush. However even they "cheat" in
that they are more than the standard 24 inches. So you effectively
waste 3 inches of space behind the cabinets. See Sub Zero.

Best, Mike.


On Jun 16, 8:39 pm, kris3432 wrote:
Hello everyone. I thought I would stop here and ask everyone's advise
about a problem that we have ran into on the house we are having
built.

We have been building the house long distance and just moved to the
area this week. We are supposed to close on the 25th.

We have ran into a problem with the fridge opening in the kitchen.
The height and width seem fine, but there is a drawer and door in the
cabinet corner that will open onto the fridge. The problem is that if
you allow space for the drawer to open the depth of the fridge can not
be any larger than 27 inches. A standard fridge is at a minimum of 34
inches, not including the door handle. We spent the evening going from
store to store measuring and pricing cabinet depth fridges, and it
looks like the ones that may work are about twice the price of regular
fridges (about $1900 versus $1000 for the regular fridge). And it is
questionable if the counter depth fridge will even work since they
measure about 29 inches with handles. (we did find a fridge that
measured under the well under the 27 depth but it was $2800)

We had our realtor meet us at the house today and she said that she
didn't think it was a problem. She didn't think it would be a big
deal to put a regular sized fridge there and just not use the door and/
or drawer.

I really think this is unacceptable. We have asked the the realtor
and builder since the beginning what size fridge we should buy and
they have told us repeatively that a standard size fridge would work.
We never planned on spending so much for a fridge.

A picture of our kitchen from a couple of weeks ago can be found here
(if is finished now):http://s155.photobucket.com/albums/s...June4/?action=...

Am I being unreasonable wanting something done about this or at least
expecting the builder to pay part of the extra cost for the fridge?

Thanks,
Kris