Large & In Charge: the Slivers & the Panels

I am doing a follow-up post to our post about the fridge we chose for our kitchen back in June of 2012.  If you can recall, it was quite a process to choose the fridge for our kitchen remodel-the balance between price, form and function is always tough.  So crazy how long ago that was, and how dark our kitchen looks back then.  I never thought of it as dark before our remodel.

Anyways, a reader emailed to ask what we thought of our paneled fridge and if the black slivers on the side of the fridge bother us. 
If you want, the short answer, no they don't bother us and yes, after almost 2 years, we love our fridge.

We debated about painting the "sliver" white with appliance paint but then decided not to as we were fearful that the white appliance paint would be too white as our paint is a creamy white and that people would know it was painted.  It would look cheap.  It would most likely scratch off with the abuse our kitchen gets on a daily basis.  Here is a post about appliance paint from Young House Love.

Anyways, we thought that we would live with the black "slivers" for a while and then decide what to do if we hated it.  I think the reason why it works in our kitchen is that we have black honed granite counters that make it blend nicely in.  If we had white or maybe even light gray counters, I think it would look pretty awful.
As far as the fridge itself, it is great overall.  Holds a sh** ton of stuff in the fridge.  Great for holding big casserole pans.  My gripe, occasionally stuff freeze that are in the top back shelf of the fridge, but maybe I just need to play around with the temp.  The water dispenser that is inside the fridge is lovely.  I still get my cold drinking water without the unsightly (as in it does not go with a historic kitchen-in a non-historic kitchen, they are great!) water dispenser on the outside of the fridge.  We still have ice in the freezer and haven't had to put up with jamming problems that are often present in in-door ice dispensers.  My other gripe-the freezer is small-but we knew this going in.  I also tend to freeze a lot so this would probably only be an issue for people like me.  However, we have a full-sized (our old fridge) kegerator in the basement so I have an extra freezer (which I, of course, manage to fill-although currently I find that homemade baby food, breast milk and the 1/4 cow we went in on with our friends takes up pretty much a whole freezer in itself-wow, that makes me sound crunchy-ha).

While it's no built-in fancy fridge, it gives us a built-in, stream-lined look on a mac n' cheese budget.  Hope that answers the question about the slivers.  As far as the panels, they are holding up great and we haven't had any issues with them.