Cabinet week! Fourteen of 22 cabinets went in this week, including all the lowers. Here’s the stack containing our mail sorter. These cabinets are just 12″ deep, with a skin beside them, to conceal the main plumbing chase. The top here will get crown moulding to fill in that hole.
The sink run of cabinets was a challenge because the floor is so far out of level — there’s a hump in the middle. The floor at the right hand end (under the mail sorter) is a full 1 1/2 inches lower than the high point, just to the left of the sink. Because of this, we don’t actually have the full 93 inches of height the design calls for with everything level and in line. This is where it pays to have a couple of actual cabinetmakers installing your cabinets. Fortunately, because the mail-sorter stack is actually 3 separate cabinets and the other uppers’ faces are on a different plane, we have the flexibility needed to make it come out right.
Starting at the right-hand end, we have the mail-sorter stack (just out of frame), silverware & storage cabinet, gap for the dishwasher, main sink base, trash & recycle pullout, and a door stack. They’re all level with one another now, though it took some doing. Under the sink cabinet is a kickspace heater.
We’re lucky that the stove run has no such difficulties, because the pantry cabinet on the end — being one 90-inch-tall monolithic unit — could not be trimmed in height. So we do have 3 inches for the crown moulding (bringing us to 93) on this wall.
Again starting at the right-hand end, we have a general storage cabinet, gap for the stove, two 30″ three-drawer pot & pan cabinets, the base for the prep sink, a cutting board / tray divider pullout, and the aforementioned tall pantry cabinet.
Finally, the installers also built the framework for the peninsula on the fridge run. This is a bit longer than we had originally designed; upon seeing a mockup, the installer and I figured it made sense to extend it to roughly align with the end of the stove run. This gives a much more comfortable seating space for someone to sit and have a drink or chop some vegetables.
We expect the counters to be templated on Monday morning, and the rest of the cabinets to be installed this week. Upper cabinets are a whole lot less work than lowers, so they should go up quickly. But crown moulding and light rail can be time consuming, and they still have to build the rest of the box around the fridge.
We ordered heavy-duty drawer glides on the two pot & pan cabinets, since they’ll bear the most weight. Thus I was concerned when I noticed that those drawer glides are the same as all the others. But a little research showed me that all our drawer glides are the heavy-duty variety (with a 50 kg rating). So either the cabinet company has switched their spec, or someone did us a favor.
The fridge was also delivered this week. We can’t hook it up until its enclosure is built, and its power & water lines are finished. But we can look. I think it’s gonna work out well for us.
I’m realizing I never talked about the pantry shelves. Over Memorial Day weekend, Lis and I went to Container Store and bought hanging rail, shelf standards, and small shelf brackets, plus a set of interlocking plastic drawer bins. I built ten 8″ shelves out of plywood with a moulding applied to the front edge, all painted white, plus an 18″ deep countertop stained with a clear finish. You can see some of the shelves in the second photo in this post. Last weekend I got as far as primer on the shallow shelves, and this weekend I put on the topcoat. I won’t screw them to the shelf brackets until we’re ready to move stuff into the pantry. And I won’t permanently attach the countertop until the carpenters have put baseboard in the pantry, so it’s not in their way. But it’s good to get finish on these shelves now so the paint can fully cure before we try to put anything on them.
On the sunroom front, we did see the footings poured this week. But they needed to cure before supporting weight, and then our main carpenter was moving house, so that’s all that happened this week. I’m a little distressed at the weather forecast for this coming week, since I fear rain will mean additional delay. I’m assured, though, that once it does start it will proceed quickly, since there’s not a lot of coordination between trades required, and they plan to bring in additional personnel to get it done.
