My husbands 39th birthday was a few weeks ago, and I wanted to show off his awesome new toy.
I got it in my head that I was going to get him one of those cool kegerator conversions from an old fridge as a gift for his birthday. I’d like to think I’m pretty handy and pretty savvy with basic tools, so I was fully confident I could handle converting an old fridge into a kegerator. I researched it for weeks, and the more I looked into it, the more I realized it was never going to happen – I didn’t have the tools or the know how to try to pull something like that off, and all I’d end up doing is killing a perfectly good fridge. So I stopped looking for a deal on an old fridge, and started looking at Craigslist to find a fridge that had already been converted into a kegerator. A lot of people were selling those cheap kegerators that they sell at costco which get abysmal ratings.
I’d all but given up hope and was about to settle on a nice dress shirt and socks for his birthday, when I hit the JACKPOT.
I found a guy who was selling this super cool vintage 1950’s Fridgidaire fridge (how cool is that!), and he had already done the conversion to a kegerator, complete with a European tap (for Guinness) and a US tap. I paid the same price for the full kegerator conversion that I’ve seen this fridge sell for on other websites BY ITSELF.
But, as you can see, aside from the fact that its a pretty cool “style” of fridge, its also pretty old and in need of some TLC – 50 years of water and rust stains isn’t pretty…
I scoured the web looking for ideas on how I could spruce this bad boy up, and I was SOOO excited to find a guy who had done a paint job on this exact same fridge, and posted his full tutorial online (click here to check out my inspiration). This was quite an undertaking and his in depth tutorial was amazing!
After about 3 weeks of disassembling, sanding, painting, more sanding, I ran into an issue with the spray paint I was using – it was eating through multiple layers of the paint and causing cracks and splits in the paint. I got the back/base of the fridge done easily with Black Appliance epoxy spray from Home Depot, but the front was just not going well. A friend of mine hooked me up with a guy who did sand blasting and seal coating – took about two weeks to get back, and holy cow – SOOOO worth the wait!!
Check her out! This is a shot of the paint job before adding the cool racing stripes…
This is the finished product after we covered the paint seams with cool chrome tape strips from eBay.
My husband is a big time Chicago sports fan, so we also found some cool magnets to go on the side (perfect for his sports cave in the basement)!
Happy 39th to the hubs, hope you love your gift, it was a labor of love, but well worth it!! (and yes, his friends are all jealous) 🙂
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