Although the tiny house isn’t yet built, we’ve been enjoying a tiny fridge for quite some time.  When we moved over a year and a half ago to the house we’re renting now, a refrigerator wasn’t provided.  After living out of a borrowed cooler for a few weeks, our initial thought was Craigslist, which is our norm when furnishing a new living space.  However, we realized if we were going to pay for a fridge, we should do a test run of the fridge we were planning to buy for our future tiny house.  We’ve never filled up a standard size refrigerator, and a tiny fridge could be our first purchase moving us toward the dream of the tiny house.  We had tested out a dorm size fridge (one of the small ones that would fit under a counter) while we were living in an apartment in Raleigh, but it was too claustrophobic.  We do appreciate our chilled food and beverage space.  We also weren’t excited about the lack of a real freezer.  So, I’d done a lot of research into apartment size fridges and talked with my parents about the fridge in their RV which seemed like a good size.

In the year and a half we’ve owned it, we’ve only on one occasion felt lacking or pinched with the amount of space our small fridge provides – and, this single instance was only a couple weeks ago when Eli came back from the field (bringing lots of left over food) at the same time his parents visited us after a camping stint (so, also bringing food to share) and I had just gone to the grocery store to make sure we were well stocked for our visitors (a hospitable thought, but oops!).  We did have to spill over into a cooler for a day.  On a few other occasions we’ve definitely filled our tiny fridge to the max (again, generally when we have visitors), but that is the most efficient way, both energy-wise and economically, to use a refrigerator, anyway.  And, most of the time our small fridge is just comfortably full or pretty empty!

Even if you’re not going tiny for your house, I’d encourage anyone who lives solitary or as a couple to consider a smaller fridge.  It consumes much less energy, takes up less of your kitchen space, and definitely facilitates not wasting food – it’s a lot harder to lose food in a small fridge and the smaller space encourages using what you have before it has time to go bad so you can free up space for new items.  Not ever have we wished for a larger fridge again – to the contrary, we really dig it!

[For those interested, our fridge is the Avanti RA7316PST 2-Door Apartment Size Refrigerator, Black with Platinum Finish]