All I needed was a vat of Pine Sol.

My grampa used to say, “The fastest way to improve the value of something is to give it a fresh coat of paint.”  Usually he’s right, but today I’m going to have to disagree.  The fastest way to improve the value of something is to clean it.  One further correction, actually…the fastest way to improve the value of your fridge is to clean it.

It turns out I don’t need a new refrigerator, after all.  I just needed to clean the sucker.  I took the drawers out of the bottom of our fridge this morning and stared in horror at was was going on under there.  “We keep food in here?” was the question I kept asking myself.  (A note to current nesting, nine-months-pregnant women who want to get some sleep tonight: Don’t look under your fridge drawers; the urge to clean it with a toothbrush will be too great to overcome and you’ll find yourself on your kitchen floor in your bathrobe at 2 a.m. scrubbing caramel sauce from the bottom shelf of your fridge, cursing me for mentioning this in my post.)

Whoever called a fridge an ice box was clearly misguided.  The fridge is hardly boxy with all of its cracks and crevices and corners for crumbs and drips to hide.  Now my fingers may look like little dried up prunes this afternoon, but by golly that funky smell, the origin of which I couldn’t quite put my finger on, is gone, and the inside of the fridge has been restored to its former gloriously gleaming white!  And the sales guys at Home Depot who always seem to sense my longing for a new fridge can just suck it.