The Problem

Many of our units were furnished with Sub-Zero refrigerators, and after almost 20 years of usage, they’re beginning to have issues.  When one fails, there’s a choice to be made:  repair it, or get a new refrigerator?

When my freezer died, I know some other people had had their’s fixed – and then later something else went out.  So, I decided to replace my refrigerator.  However, Sub-Zero refrigerators are really, really expensive – upwards of $16,000, so I decided to replace it with a 800 series Bosch – a premium appliance, but only $4,000.

The Solution Created Another Problem

The original Sub-Zero refrigerators are 80″ tall.  However, most refrigerators are 72″ tall – and that leaves an ugly 8″ hole above the fridge.  You can get 80″ tall refrigerators, but that really limits you to a much smaller selection, and they’re often more expensive.  So, I decided to do something about the hole.

First pass – wine racks

My first idea was to get some wine racks to fill the space – the photo below shows how this came out:

However, you can still see the sheetrock and other stuff behind the wine bottles, so this wasn’t satisfactory.

Second pass – black art board

I had some black art board left over from a previous project (⅛” foam with cardboard on both sides).  It was 40″ x 32″, so I trimmed 4″ off of it, and put a bend 14″ above the end – this hid all the sheet rock and other stuff.  On the left side, I took another piece and just taped it to the wall to hide the sheet rock.  Here’s the finished design:This solution has an added benefit – my wine fridge that’s in my kitchen island doesn’t hold the really wide bottles you get with some red wines, now I have a place to put these large bottles ☺

This solution only took me about 30 minutes to do, looks great, and cost ~$20 for the art board, and $34 for the wine racks (got them on Amazon).