When we bought our house a few years ago, we knew that it required a few fix-ups. The roof was the first to be done, because no-one wants water leaking into their house (it wasn’t that bad yet, but we like to err on the side of caution). The furnace and A/C were next up, and we were surprised to learn that the furnace was original to the house (about 45 years old?) and the A/C was no spring chicken either (about 25 years old, I think). Both still worked, which probably says something about how things were made, but we didn’t want to take the chance of the furnace dying in the middle of winter when it was minus thirty degrees. The replacement of the windows started last year, and we discovered that they too were mostly original to the house, although, in another testament to “how things were made”, on the energy audit we had done just after we bought the house they still fared better than windows in a 10-15 year old house!

Our house also came with an upright freezer, which was showing its age externally, but was still chugging along. It was always in our plans to get a new one, but it wasn’t high on the list since it still fulfilled the requirement of keeping things frozen. We finally got around to replacing it last week and pulled the old one out from the wall to defrost it before removal.

And found the original delivery tag still attached to the back. From 1981.

They really did make things to last back then.