buying advice needed for fridge, freezer

Hello there

I need to replace the fridge-freezer that was in the cottage when we bought it and would appreciate your advice. The current fridge-freezer looks big on the outside but is actually quite small inside and the fridge part no longer works (have had it checked).

I would prefer to buy something that is not built in (I’m not sure of the terminology, but I mean when appliances have matching covers put on their doors).

From what I have read on the net, it appears that fridge-freezers are not as reliable as having a separate fridge and freezer. So ideally I’d like to buy separate fridge and freezer and stack them. But really this depends on your advice! If we can stack them, probably we’d need a frost-free freezer only because better to stack that on top of the fridge and defrosting it might be a bit interesting otherwise… If we can’t stack them, we’d have to go for a fridge-freezer because there is no room for anything else. Ceiling height in the kitchen is ok, think it’s 7-8 feet.

Our situation: this is for our weekend cottage, and normally it’s just my husband and me, but sometimes we have a few guests, so a largeish capacity fridge would be good. We eat a lot of fresh food. The fridge and freezer would be stored in the kitchen. This can get quite warm when we are not there as the rayburn in the kitchen is permanently on (there is about 18 inches between the rayburn and the current fridge-freezer). The freezer would not have to be too big, but large enough to store a chicken, a loaf of bread, peas, ice, ice cream, and maybe a few containers of stock etc. As far as bottles are concerned, normally we store these elsewhere and only put them in to chill before serving, so bottle storage is not a primary consideration.

I’d really appreciate your advice.