We've Got Cabinets!

(click on photos for a larger view)

I'm so tired. But what a great weekend!! All of the cabinets are in except for the two in the island, and I need to figure those out still... like, now. I also need to get a cooktop and an oven, then I can order countertops. If I do the countertops in two separate orders, I could do the perimeter ones now and the island, with the cooktop, later.

I've posted new pictures from the last 2 days are on flickr. But here are a choice few, looking north and south at the ends of days 2 and 3, and one of Paul lending a hand. Days 2 and 3 were not as popular as day 1, but we had got our method pretty much down and production was pretty quick.

Day 2 we got in the lowers in the south wall and the uppers on the north wall and got the boxes out for the lowers on the west wall. Day 3, Julia, Barb, Pat and I got all the lowers mostly in on the west and north walls and Lara and Julia moved the refrigerator into the kitchen from the dining room which involved emptying it and taking off the doors. Paul pretty much floated, and Dad was on call for helping us while he was otherwise upstairs working on putting together a shopping list for the bathroom plumbing.


We went as long as we could before Paul basically demanded a nap, which meant it was time for the Portland and points south contingent to have lunch and hit the road. I met them at Kidd Valley for lunch, then we pretty much went our separate ways. When I returned home Steve had arrived and Dad was not yet back from the hardware stores for plumbing supplies (he has all my sympathy for that task which is never so simple as it might sound).

We re-set the cabinet above the refrigerator, which had been quite a puzzle when we put it in the day before, and still didn't look quite right. I can't remember which assumption we'd made that worked against us, either that the box was square or that the corner of the wall was, or that the wall itself was plumb. Anyway, we released a little pressure on all but one of the screws and placed another shim or two and then called it good. Similarly we made some final adjustments to the lower cabinets in the northwest corner and then screwed everything together one final time. (Pat and Barb, you won't believe how tight we finally got that joint. It looks great and when I got the doors back on those cabinets at first they actually overlapped a little bit!).

Finally Dad and Steve tried to level the refrigerator. As luck would have it, the installation instructions included a section on how to level the fridge. Unfortunately, however, the diagram did not match the actual hardware, so it didn't entirely work but it's pretty darn good.


Here's hoping the dentist can find time for me tomorrow. I lost a filling on Saturday night and have been dealing with a sharp crag where my lower left molar is supposed to be for a coupld of days now. I'm not having sensitivity to hot and cold (yet) so maybe I should count myself lucky for that. With all the great help and passing luck on everything with the kitchen this weekend, I am counting myself very lucky for a lot of things right now.

A MILLION THANKS TO ALL WHO HELPED!!