<p>BunsenBurner, so sorry you are having so much hit you all at once this week. The fridge kicking the bucket won’t be a very big deal in time, but I sure hope your test results all come back with good news and that your cat is healthy again soon.</p>
<p>Marinmom, that’s fantastic about the energy savings with your new refrigerator!</p>
<p>We bought the top of the line GE side-by-side in the summer of 1988 and knock on wood, it’s still working today other than for the water through the door (which I think was more a problem with the connection coming undone that it not working from the refrigerator, but am not sure; I just know we’ve had to fill the ice bin ourselves for years and get water from the kitchen sink).</p>
<p>I’m guessing our model might be the same as swimcatsmom’s as it also has 5 hanging microwavable containers (three of a smaller size and two of a larger size) that I have felt an incredibly nice feature and I am bummed to read that this is no longer available for new refrigerators. 
Do the new models have a little sliding hanging thing for French bread or Pillsbury dough containers or other such stuff, or did they do away with that, too (as that’s another thing we like having)?</p>
<p>We have the drop down door for serving drinks, but other than for storing opened wine bottles in that compartment, I rarely use it (and I rarely use it even for storing open wine bottles as we don’t open bottles of wine at home all that often unless we have company and then it often gets finished and doesn’t need to be refrigerated). Ours also has a “door open” alarm that my husband loves having on and I usually turn off as it drives me nuts when it keeps beeping when I am putting stuff in their from the grocery store.</p>
<p>Ours has tinted bins for meat, vegetables, fruit, and cheese and I liked that they didn’t show all the food when we bought the thing, but clear is far better, I now realize, as you aren’t as likely to eat what you don’t see AND stuff can go bad more easily without you realizing until something smells (I am not someone to just clean the refrigerator every week like I should be).</p>
<p>We never had a side-by-side till we got this one in 1988 (before that, I grew up with the freezer on the bottom and then had the freezer on the top in my apartment in graduate school and when first married; my husband had only had ones with the freezer on the top) and we both really love it. We can pretty easily fit large cakes (for major parties) and such in it, so I consider it both pretty deep and pretty wide. We are able to pull out the bottom drawer of the freezer, but even still, will admit some of the stuff that gets put in the bottom drawer never gets noticed again for ages (though I did happen to poke around in there just last night, that was unusual). And it’s easy to organize the freezer in a side-by-side as you can have certain items stored in the door shelves (I tend to keep the frozen veggies there) and other things on the inside shelves (like we have a dedicated ice cream shelf closest to the ice bin and then another shelf for frozen pizzas and Hot Pockets and so on).</p>
). Yes ours is a GE from '88 or '89 so it sounds like the same. We use the little door a lot - milk for my tea all day and when my son lived at home for making chocolate milk - that kid must have the strongest bones in the world - I swear he drank a gallon a day - plus juice. When this one dies i will really miss both the door feature and the microwaveable containers. Probably the latter most - our fridge is always packed (my husband is a fervent Sams shopper and overbuyer) so I have to dig around to find stuff and the sliding storage is a life saver for me! Maybe if I have to get a new fridge I can rig up some way to transfer that to the new one.</p>