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!