My wife and I like our CD fridge, it is a Kenmore Elite CD but is made by Samsung. Has the twin cooling and a great LED display. we got ours when they were on sale for 30% off for a little over $2000. The only thing that we are not totally pleased with is the drawers which are rather shallow BUT that is the price we have to pay for having the CD I guess. Other than that it is a great fridge, very quiet. We have the matching Kenmore Elite dishwasher that we bought many years ago and it was black, so we just swapped the front panel to stainless. It has preformed perfectly for about 6-7 years now.

We are waiting for our cabinets to be finished, so I can;t tell you if this will work out - but we have a cabinet with one shelf above the refrigerator. We will use it for large pans that only get ocassional use - the 12 qt stock pot, the wok (ok - we use it a lot, but its long handle needs the depth), the dehydrator, and the cast iron deep oblong pan. When I need one of these I will have to get the step stool out.

As you use your kitchen over the next several days make mental notes about how often you use the fridge for various purposes. Do you open it a lot during food prep.? How many items do you take out of it during prep? How often do you open it during non-prep times--i.e. breakfast, snacks, sandwich making, beverages? How many items go straight from fridge to table and back again? I don't use my fridge during prep as often as I thought. If I'm making a salad, I go over and grab all the salad ingredients at once. When I'm making a meal I have a pretty good idea about what I'm going to be using and I try to cut my trips down by taking several things out at once. Most of the items I improvise with (seasonings, oils, etc.) aren't refrigerated and are stored in the cooking/prep zone. Sometimes I have to walk to it for butter or milk or eggs, but not as often as I thought. I prefer to have our fridge near the table and out of the prep zone. It's accessible for non cooking/prepping activities all day long--which is how it is most heavily used. To me, keeping others out of my cooking/prep zone is worth the trade off of not having the fridge right at my fingertips. We tend to use a lot of items from the fridge while we are eating. Having the fridge close by makes meal times a lot more relaxing and setting and clearing the table becomes less of a chore. Our plates and silverware are near the table so others can set the table and get items out of the fridge without crossing paths with me. Also, I wanted to maximize window space in our prep area and there wasn't a good spot for the fridge. I like having lots of storage in my cooking/prep area for the tools I use. This is more important to me than having fridge drawers (plus I prefer to keep things simple-one less appliance to clean and maintain and no hassle trying to find something to fit the same space when it needs to be replaced.) The fridge is placed between the kitchen and dining area. It's not terribly far from my prep area--it's a straight shot to get to it, no islands or peninsulas to walk around.

Unless you are going to be living with this kitchen another 10 years and will be selling it at a 100K discount as a gut reno, the correct solution IS to replace like with like. You don't usually see SubZeros in suburban tract homes, so unless that was the case and the PO was a bit eccentric in that way, your kitchen is best served by having the level of appliances replaced with the level that is already installed. Anything less, and yes, you are downgrading the kitchen and that's a road you don't want to start going down if you want to keep up the value of your home. Even with the real estate market trending downward, there's always further down to go if a buyer feels that the home may not have been "kept up". A non built in in a built in's hole gives them more opportunity to think this was the case.