JOHN COFFELT Contributor

About 10 years ago, Erik and Amanda Johnson made a major life decision to open Ez Appliance Repair. Now as the couple celebrate 34 years of marriage, they are still proving that sometimes the old is better than new.

“It’s usually a lot cheaper to fix something than replace it,” Erik said. “Some of the older stuff, if the parts are available, it’s better to have that than the new stuff. A 30-year-old refrigerator, you can put out of the front porch, you put a new one on the front porch, in this weather, everything in the freezer will thaw out and the refrigerator won’t keep.”

Amanda said her “grandma’s avocado refrigerator is still running somewhere, I promise.”

“If it’s not worth fixing, my husband’s going to tell you,” she said. “We’re not going to come out and charge you $600 in parts and then leave.”

Amanda said she worked for Coffee County Schools until 2014 when she injured her back. Erik felt he needed to stay home and care for his wife. Erik had worked warranty repairs for Sears for 18 years, but also had a number of side calls from people who wanted him to come out separate from Sears.

Amanda’s back injury was a fork in the road, and the two never looked back.

“We had wanted to do it, but it’s easy to say we want to do it,” she said. “One day we realized we had to do something. It was sink or swim.”

Erik said that even before he ventured out on his own, Lowes management had approached him with an offer that if he ever went out on his own to call him.

“Well, I did call him, and Lowes was my first extended warranty that we picked up, and it kept going from there,” Erik said.

Ez Appliances does warranty and non-warranty work on all major appliances (except warranty work for LG), and sometimes a few other jobs.

Ez Appliances’ first private customer was Mrs. Vera Parks, the now-deceased, former owner of Rose Hill Cemetery.

“We were going to eat – just had our ribbon cutting, and she was going into Zaxby’s in Tullahoma. She noticed the magnet on our van and said, ‘I wished you would come fix my refrigerator,” Erik recalled.

Parks had called other repairmen to look at the fridge, but no one could get it working. Erik made a deal, if he couldn’t fix it, he wouldn’t charge her.

“I went and fixed it … and she had me doing everything for her after that, changing light bulbs to replacing a screen door,” he said.    

“I’m still scared to this day that the phone is not going to ring,” Amanda said. “But it always does, that’s why I’m so friendly with the customers. We want people to refer us and to call us back.”

Amanda said that she will be the first to send a customer somewhere else if they are overbooked rather than leave someone hanging. Also, if the repair would be more costly than a replacement, they are the first to advise the customer on that.