With your budget, you're in budget to mid range refrigerator/freezer combo territory. The cheapest separate units are the Frigidaire, and they're about $1500 each on sale, and require around 70" of space by the time you add the surrounds. Even with someone with a more robust budget may not be able to afford the space needed to design them into a regular sized kitchen and not overwhelm it. Your best bet is to look at overall capacity, and get a French door model, as it has more shelf capacity. The Korean brands get good ratings and tend to have larger capacity models. With Black Friday coming up, you might find a deal on a discontinued model for around your budget. But, you also want to plan for an auxiliary refrigerator and possibly separated freezer in a laundry room or pantry. We've got both, and use both, together with the standard sized fridge in the kitchen. And we're just two old farts who like to freeze garden produce and buy meat from a local farmer who butchers what he raises.

We installed separate 24" Thermador refrigerator and freezer columns flanking our pantry, the freezer is the one on the right with the ice and water dispenser. We couldn't remove the pantry since it is partially underneath a stairway. It's worked out really well for us. Thermador also makes 18" and 30" units, right or left opening. We also looked at Liebherr which makes similar units, I think they were a little shorter.

We have the 30" Thermador individual columns and would do it again in a NY minute! Yeah, they look pretty, blah blah blah, but what is really attractive is all that storage space! Holy cow. Granted, because they're built-in the storage is shallower, but we find that we don't lose much in the back .... You bet it cost significantly more than a combined unit (side-by-side, french door, etc.) but this was one of those non-negotiables for us, and in fact, that was pretty much what predicated the whole kitchen reno. (Sure, there were other factors, but ever since we had children we've been dreaming about separate fridge / freezer units.) We did look at the less expensive stand alones but turns out what we couldn't afford was the space: we just didn't have the extra foot of room (for the 36" units), and we didn't want to do a 36" fridge with a 24" freezer -- we wanted the max from both the units. (When we were looking Northland was still a dirty word -- it's my anecdotal understanding their quality has since improved.) We love and use all the storage, and in fact are horrible consumers because we even have a set of 24" fridge drawers. We try and make ourselves feel a little better by remembering they're all energy star .... (We keep our children's snacks and drinks, lunchtime foods in the drawers. Oh yeah, and beer! Our eldest [he's four] can open the drawers himself which we think is terrifically handy.) Anyway, my ultimate answer to your question is: Yes, they are worth it.

@Suzanne Giomi, ahhhh! Ok, this is making sense now. I know you listed some prices above, but remind me how much more is the fridge column with 2 drawers (with your Wolf discount) for you vs the fridge column without drawers (with discount)? You seem to really love the over/under option with freezer drawers, so that is what I am leaning toward for you, considering your budget may be a little flexible? I think in the end, you will be very happy and even if roughly 2,000 more, this choice is for many years to come right? Ok, I have to get your opinion then on the fridge over/under, as far as the drawers go. Do you think produce might get lost in the drawers vs. in the drawers of the single column? Again, I have not seen the over/under in person, but the one thing I don't want, is to be rummaging through deep drawers for produce. Are there lots of dividers so this would not be an issue? What do you personally like better about the drawers vs having everything organized on shelves in the full column and also in the interior drawers of the full column? Hopefully this makes sense! This thread has opened a whole new can of worms for me!