The Aerie
The CABINETS are here, the CABINETS are here!
Yes, the cabinets have finally arrived, so our kitchen looks more like a kitchen and less like an aisle at the Salvation Army. The pantry and counter will take a little getting used to, but their utility will make the effort worthwhile.
The installation occurred on the same day that our contractor began painting the boys' bedroom, so Sunday night was a fury of lugging, moving, packing, sweeping, dusting, washing, and shoving. The boys' bedroom was as usual a complete pit, dust and broken toys and candy wrappers and crumpled papers mixed with dirty clothes and books and unbroken toys. But we got it cleaned and moved and when I arrived home from work I was greeted by new cabinets and the penetrating odor of primer paint.
The cabinets are very nice. We managed to get almost identical style and countertop to the rest of the kitchen, so aside from lacking patina they integrate well with the existing equipment. We also got her to adjust one of the existing cabinet doors so that it doesn't droop anymore. Yay!
In the boys' room I repaired a broken closet door in a very weird way. I purchased a cheap track replacement kit (oh great, now I've gotten "Breakfast in America" stuck in my head) and couldn't make heads-nor-tails of the instructions, which appeared to have been written by Egyptian or Aztec iconographers. The long, thin cardboard cases were chock full of bolts, nuts, screws, and plastic bits of indescribable shape or purpose. The boxes had decorative panels cut out, which then exposed the sticky back of the vinyl label to the interior and held all the bits and pieces together so that they didn't slide around in the box. Clever!
Trying out a few replacement runners (the wheels at the top meant to slide along the track), I observed that the new ones had narrower bases than the ones presently in the doors, meaning that the holes were too big and extreme measures would be needed to make the replacement runners stay in place.
Then I had a notion, replaced the original runner, and knocked the wheel off the top. The result was a spring-loaded brass cylinder, just about the width of the new runner. It was a little tricky fitting the doors in, but once in place and adjusted they work perfectly.
Leaving 90% of the contents of the box unused, of course.
So the cabinets are in place, the room should be painted today or tomorrow, and that will leave the upstairs for the rest of the projects. Adding to yesterday's chaos, the contractor for the upstairs came by a couple of times to work on finalizing the design of the upstairs space.
It will be interesting to see how disruptive it will be to have to move everything in the attic elsewhere for a couple of months, and of course we haven't given a thought to where we'll sleep during this time. Maybe we'll just leave the bed upstairs, and I can come to work every day covered in a fine film of gypsum dust.
The next few days or weeks will be spent hauling the contents of our basement "pantry" (a pile of 20-year-old Target plastic tables) up to the kitchen and arranging all our kitchenware into the new cabinets. And then... the upstairs remodeling begins!
Posted by Albatross at March 6, 2006 7:01 PM | TrackBack