Kitchen Cabinets

Woot! The cabinets are in!!! (mostly…)

So, once again I was up late doing the last of the patching and painting. Got things done just in time, in typical Mary fashion. It was super humid the last few days, so the drywall patching took forever to dry and sand, and of course that was all with the morning deadline looming!

Most of the spots were going to be behind cabinets, which I shouldn’t have cared about but did anyway. However it was of course one of the visible patches that was giving me the most trouble. I had done it before buying the extra hunk of drywall to use for patching. (We had big sheets in the garage, but getting to them wasn’t going to happen.) ARGH!

I eventually ended up ripping it out around 9PM because it was still mushy, and then redoing it with a real patch and less goop. Then I used the blow-dryer to get it to dry faster. (Thanks for the suggestion, Christy!) It still took an hour of blow-dry, wait a bit, sand and repeat to get it looking nice, but it does look nice.

It was around 9:30 when I started painting by working on the less patched wall first. I finished around 2:30 AM with just enough time for about 4 hours of sleep before needing to be up for work and the cabinet installer to show up. Woot!!!

I had left the wiring for the microwave outlet until the morning so that I could see with the power off, and was just getting the last screws in place when the doorbell rang. Of course it occurred to me as he was coming in that the new outlet would probably be too low. The new cabinet wasn’t going to be as tall! Unfortunately, the Home Depot Designer guy didn’t give me a copy of the plan to use when doing this sort of stuff, so I didn’t know exactly how much shorter it would be. (Grumble, Grumble…)

Anyhow, the installer from Home Depot Crew2 (Eric) was great! First thing he did was measure, and of course it was too low. I ended up being off by about 8 inches or so. No fudging that. So, one more hole to patch; good thing I’m becoming so pro at it!!!

Anyhow, Eric was great. Best part of the whole kitchen process so far. He’s timely, polite, neat and professional. Also, he was completely undaunted by all the unexpected bits, like my outlet being too low. There was also a mess of plumbing that was in the way, which he carefully removed to avoid cutting up too much of the sink cabinet, aw well as the pipes through the floor which were of course in the way of the cleverly designed under-sink drawer. Super happy with his work!

He got a lot done today. I was really surprised. Here’s how it looked at the end of the day!

New pantry cabinets in the corner of the old eat in kitchen. Yes, that orange fur ball in the back is Kyo bravely exploring.

New cabinets around the sink & dishwasher area.

New cabinets around the range & fridge area. (Yes I still have to patch the hole… again… sigh.)

As you can see if you look closely, the lower cabinets still have some work to be wrapped up, but things should be done in a few hours more tomorrow. Now I really need to get on the ball for my appliance hunt…