Beginning of cabinet installation

Running behind on posting to this blog!  Here's the post I meant to put up last week...

First off, some more trim work has been going on, running the baseboards around the room, finishing door frames...  Here's a shot of the back stairs with their new treads, trim, and the hardwood strip around the edge.  The subfloor now has backing material for the tile that's going to be installed by the back door.

All those boxes in the previous post were full of cabinets!  Here's a shot of the cabinets being installed by the door to the dining room.  Our old side hutch is becoming a new side hutch and small utility closet, with a lot more pantry storage space.  The gap in the middle will have a small countertop for fruit bowls, music system, etc.

Rotating to the left, the other corner on this side of the kitchen is getting some standard cabinets.  I'm particularly un-fond of deep corner cabinets where you lose things forever.  So the upper corner cabinet is a clever design that the manufacturer calls "easy-reach" which has overlapping shelves coming from both directions in an L-shaped cabinet, with a folding L-shaped door.  The "dead space" in the bottom corner is where there's an opening through the dining room wall so that I can use that corner to store table leaves and a hanging tablecloth rack, accessed through a cabinet door in the dining room that will open into a TARDIS-like space.

Continuing to rotate around the room, this next corner is where the oven and fridge are going.  Getting this whole bank of cabinets to play nicely together was tricky, because we're trying to maximize our storage space and not have any useless, inaccessible dead space.  Tony spent the entire first day of cabinet installation with a tape measure and calculator, figuring and re-figuring how to do it, and where spacers needed to be added.  On the one hand, if there was too much space on the right side, the cabinets in the middle would overlap the side window frame, and the left-most cabinet drawers would bash into the frame of the back window.  On the other hand, if there was too much space on the left side, you wouldn't be able to open the drawers of the right-most cabinets without running into the drawer handles of the adjacent bank.  It all came down to the placement of a crucial 1/8" gap, which made it all work out perfectly in the end.  During this painstaking process, he found an "extra" 3 inches  next to the window which is allowing us to replace one of the too-narrow upper cabinet boxes with one that is a more comfortable size.  The other fun part was making all the tops of the cabinets line up -- while the new ceiling is level, the old subfloor is not.  Tony and Mike figured out the optimal set of shimming and shaving of toe-kicks to make everything turn out straight, level, and with enough room for our Scooba floor-mopping robot to get underneath the toe-kicks.

The island in the middle of the kitchen is turning out very nicely.  They cut out a plywood top as a temporary measure to make sure that all the dimensions worked out before the slab of granite gets cut.  It's a good thing, because as we tested it out, we found that we were going to need another 4 inches of granite hanging off the back in order to comfortably pull a stool up and sit at the back side of the island.

Since I like to do things in a non-standard fashion...  I ordered these double-sided cabinets with glass doors to put into the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room.  It's not how these cabinets were intended to be used by the manufacturer, so before we hang them up, we're attaching extra lumber to their tops to give them more stiffness, and gluing their sides firmly together to make a single, hanging cabinet bank.  Here's the boxes as they were clamped and waiting for all the glue to dry.  In the next post you'll see them take shape in their proper position!

When do we get to open the presents?

The beginning of last week started with a delivery truck dropping off all our new appliances.  It will be a while until they are installed, but the carpenters don't quite trust what the spec sheets say in terms of the exact dimensions needed, and they want to be able to see them in person.  So a whole bunch of boxes filled up one corner of the dining room.  At the end of last week, all the cabinetry was delivered from the cabinet factory, also in boxes.  It was like two whole rooms full of Christmas presents!  Here's the dining room:

And here's the kitchen:

The kitchen is partly covered in plastic because we realized that this was out last chance to roll on ceiling paint and wall primer without the complication of having to go around the cabinets.  So that's what I did all weekend...

A bunch of trim work got done last week in between the deliveries.  The banged-up basement stair tread from the last post was replaced with a new oak tread.  Notably, the crown moulding around the inside of the tray ceiling went up:

It may not look too exciting yet (as white on white) but suddenly the room has a more finished look.  (and suddenly got harder to paint)  That piece of crown is going to be hiding a rope light which will give us an indirect glow off the ceiling when the mood dictates.

The last of the old bathroom floor and the last of the back hall floor went away.  These were the hard-to-cut-out parts, like the part wedged under the back door threshold.  I had no idea how they were going to get that out because it's hard to wedge a circular saw in next to the sloping metal threshold.  The guys got out a thing I hadn't seen before called a Fein saw, and once I saw it in action I knew this was an amazing tool that I need in my arsenal someday.  It worked like a sawzall but it could dip straight into the floor in exactly the way that a sawzall can't.  Another hard-to-get piece of floor was the chunk under the bathroom radiator.  They solved it by just hanging the radiator in mid-air, half a centimeter above the old floor:

The last thing you want to do is mess with unhooking and reconnecting a radiator that's already working just fine.  It seems that everyone who knows how to do that correctly is well past retirement.  Several years ago we had to have a radiator repaired, and the furnace guys called in their "specialist," an ancient and distinguished old gentleman who came hobbling into the house very slowly, leaning heavily on his cane.  I don't know if he still even makes house calls, so this radiator will hang there like that until the tile goes in.

The radiator we really weren't going to mess with was the big kitchen radiator:

We just left the original floor under it and put the hardwood up against the old linoleum.  In a couple of weeks we're going to be building a custom radiator cover to go over this, so you will never see this piece of old floor (unless you're fixing the radiator for some reason).  I've got a pile of images of arts-and-crafts style radiator covers, and we're designing something that will look good here.  Eventually a countertop will go over this, and it will become the breakfast nook part of the kitchen.

This week we get to open the presents!