Sunday, October 23, 2011

We Have Cabinets!

We finally have all of the cabinets in with doors on them.
Oh except for the one over the fridge. We have to cut that one shorter so we can put new floor in underneath the fridge.
This week's task is to get the countertop ordered.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Pretty cabinets all in a row.

For the new kitchen, I wanted a lot of space between the counter and the wall cabinet, so I chose the Akurum horizontal model. My plan was to have a shelf underneath the cabinet for my pretty dishes. I've always liked open shelves and have been accumulating nicer dishes for this reason.
In order to accommodate my storage needs and fit the space, I mixed 3 of these horizontal cabinets with the microwave cabinet and the tall pantry. You are given a handy long strip of wall bracket for your cabinets to hang from. However, for some unknown reason different cabinets have the holes at different heights. The 3 vertical ones all went up together nicely, but we had to cut the bracket and lower it for the microwave cabinet. Same for the pantry. The bracket is easy to cut, but some care had to be used since you want to screw the it into a stud.
Also you can see we had to cut the cabinet to accommodate the stove vent. (These vents will prove to be pesky as you will see with the sink install.) The cabinet was easy to cut, so not much of a problem there. The stove ended up moving over a few inches, so we went with flexy pipe instead of moving the vent over as well.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Domsjo- uh oh.


We decided to go with the Domsjo farmhouse sink. This sink fits with the Akurum sink base, but you won't use the cross bars that come with the cabinet assembly. Since the Domsjo sink is so deep, it comes with metal cross bars that are installed lower than the wooden ones.
We didn't realize this when we assembled our cabinets first. The husband had attached this cabinet to one next to it and the wall before opening up the sink. We had to cut the wooden cross pieces out in order to install the metal ones.
The next issue was the space for the pipes. Since this sink sits lower, you only have 23"of height for the pipes. The old vent went into the wall too high for the new sink and we thought we might have to put all of that black pipe into the wall. Luckily the home store had a vent termination piece that fit.
So the lesson we have been learning is,"yes it saved a lot of time to assemble all of the cabinets first." However, it would have been very helpful to open the accessory pieces for each cabinet as well.
I do love this sink and am glad we went with this one instead of another stainless steel sink. This is the smaller size, but it still has a huge bowl. So I have more sink volume now than I had with the old double sink.


Friday, October 07, 2011

Kitchen demo

The first weekend, the upper cabinets were down and off to Habitat for Humanity.
The lesson here-don't give only half of your cabinets to charity. They weren't too pleased with the idea of waiting for the base cabinets. HfH wants all of the cabinets at the same time.
We just weren't able to pull out everything or get it all over to them at once.

The next weekend, I got the paint mostly done. This is the second color. The first was a grey that made me very unhappy so I went with my backup color; light blue. Much easier to paint the room without the cabinets.

We got 2 new cabinets up on the wall. We are living out of that red tub until we can get the pantry in. It's not completely primitive though. That's mac n cheese on the stovetop.