Sub-Zero Repair in Back Bay

Parlour floor, garden floor, and two different jobs

Kitchens in these houses sit either at garden level, half a flight down from the street, or on the parlour floor above it. The garden-level kitchen usually has its own door onto the alley, which makes everything simpler and also means the appliance is closer to damp and to whatever the alley air carries. The parlour kitchen is the difficult one: it is up a flight, often through a hall too narrow to swing a door, and in more than a few houses the unit was set in place before the surrounding cabinetry was finished.

Where that is the case, a repair that can be completed in situ is worth a great deal more than one that cannot, and it changes the order in which things get checked.

Condo conversion, single unit, whole building

Most of these houses are now four or five units. That has two practical effects on a refrigeration call: the electrical supply to the kitchen has been divided and re-divided over the years, and the condenser exhaust from a built-in may be venting into a space that is no longer the same room it once was. Both are worth eliminating before anyone opens a sealed system.

The usual complaints from these kitchens

• Compartment temperature climbing on hot afternoons and recovering by morning
• Water on the floor in front of the unit, which is nearly always a frozen defrost drain
• A door that no longer pulls itself shut on the last inch
• Ice maker producing hollow or undersized cubes after a supply-line change