We moved into our new house in 2020, when my wonderful son was just shy of his second birthday. I needed to start thinking about locking up some of our guns so he couldn’t access them. Yep. You read that right. Me, the electric car-driving, energy efficiency-loving, composting, wannabe-gardener, fitness enthusiast* owns guns. More on that, perhaps, in another post.
“What Are We Going to Use This Old Fridge For?”
This post is all about how I married the idea of getting something to lock our guns up with the circumstances with which I was presented. It’s often the case that reusing things you already have saves lots of time, money, and gives new life to something that would otherwise become landfill fodder.
With our new house came a wonderful old refrigerator. The fridge is a Kelvinator, manufactured by the American Motors Corporation in Detroit, Michigan. It’s the kind of yellow, or almond, that was all the rage back in the day it was manufactured. I’m guessing this thing was made sometime in the 1950s. The previous owner’s son told me it had been given to them by a family friend when they originally bought the house (1977), and that it was old even then.
Pulling the Plug
I unplugged it right when we moved in. My issue with continuing to use this fridge was based purely upon its energy efficiency. When the compressor kicked on to run it, the lights dimmed. I recently read an article in the Winter 2021 edition of Washington Consumers’ Checkbook magazine that stated this about refrigerator energy efficiency: “Ten-year-old fridges cost about $75 a year to run; 25-year-old models about $100 a year; and your parents’ indestructible 40-year-old one can drain away more than $200 a year.” To that, I ask… what about my indestructible 60+ year-old model? $300 a year?
The only thing I regret about curtailing its useful life is that this thing probably would have outlived me. Alas, it wasn’t to be. So I came up with the idea of converting it to hold guns!
Let me be clear, this is certainly not designed to stop thieves from stealing its contents. There are better-designed safes for that purpose.** I was more aiming for a gun cabinet/locker to keep the little man out and to keep other people honest. I think it might actually serve some anti-theft purpose, though, in that it’s one of those hiding-in-plain-sight setups. Unless they’re really thirsty, who is going to look through the basement fridge when scanning a home to burgle?
Planning and Alterations
I was lucky that this Kelvinator fridge was an old-timey one where the freezer compartment is built into the fridge space (just like in a mini fridge). This enabled me enough height to accommodate some of the longer guns I wanted to store inside of it, so long as I could move the freezer section out of the way. Initially I was going to cut the freezer portion out of the fridge and remove it altogether. Upon closer inspection, there was no safe, simple way to do this because the refrigerant lines were embedded in the freezer compartment. If I were to remove the freezer, it would have leaked refrigerant everywhere—probably not a great option.
Instead, I opted to relocate the freezer compartment within the fridge interior, keeping the refrigerant lines intact. The freezer compartment is now a shelf on the side of the fridge, mounted with a few drywall screws to keep it in place.
There were a few other alterations I needed to make to the Kelvinator to make it functional for its new purpose. I lined the bottom with a foam pad, taken from the inside of an old rifle hard case and cut to size. I also bought and installed a locking latch on the exterior to keep the aforementioned honest people honest.
Finishing Touches
The final piece was to install a mechanism to keep moisture out of the interior, because metal doesn’t like humidity. I purchased a Lockdown GoldenRod dehumidifier rod (<—AFFILIATE LINK) for this purpose. It has an average 5-star rating over 4,203 Amazon ratings, so I figured it probably works? I bought this over the rechargeable desiccants because I had read a few reviews of those units breaking and leaking into safes. Obviously, this is not something I particularly wanted to deal with.
So once this bad boy arrived, I drilled a hole through the back of the fridge (making sure not to puncture any of the condenser coils) and ran the electrical wire through it to plug in. One feature I really appreciated about the product was that the plug head is removable from the wire itself. As a result, I didn’t have to drill a hole any larger than the electrical wire to install it. Great thinking on the manufacturer’s part. I just removed the plug head, slipped the wire through the small-diameter hole I drilled, and reconnected the plug head. Easy peasy.
I’m happy to say the whole project was a success. Hopefully I’ve given some useful information that might be able to help someone else out along the way. If not, maybe I’ve at least planted a seed to help you think what you might reuse or repurpose instead of making more landfill fodder. Waste not, want not. Right?
*I mention “fitness-enthusiast” in this list because people like this typically want to extend their lives. There is scientific consensus that gun ownership and being around guns is overwhelmingly antithetical to this endeavor.
**But, probably not the safes you’d get from big box stores. More on that in a future post, where I finally convince my brother to write on something he’s way too knowledgeable about…
Brillant!
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