cabinet beginnings

Just a quick update before my brain explodes or falls asleep - not sure which will come first.

We spent a couple of hours tonight installing the beginnings of our new cabinets.  As mentioned previously, we slowly assembled the cabinets in our garage over the past two weeks and they were queued up, ready for installation.  (Note:  the cabinet assembly portion of the show was super easy - I'd say maybe 10 minutes per cabinet?)

As predicted, the hardest part (so far) of our installation was the suspension rail.  We had to determine the perfect height, the correct length, make sure it was level and spanned the required number of studs, and confirmed that it would produce an end result of our various-sized wall cabinets being at the same height.

Several blank stares and a few eye rolls later, our suspension rail was up.  After that, hanging the cabinets was easy.  We just have two more wall cabinets to install - the one above the stove and the other just to the right of the stove.  We need to move an electrical box before installing those so hopefully we can get those taken care of tomorrow night.  Once the remaining uppers are in and we attach the cabinet side-panels and the framing that will box in the fridge, we will proceed with screwing each of the cabinets together.  (Right now they are firmly attached to the suspension rail and bumped snuggly next to each other but they aren't screwed into one another.  We want to make sure everything fits properly and everything is 100% level before doing that!)

Here's a little reminder of what we started with:

And for now, this is the organized chaos that is our kitchen:

The cabinet on the ground under the uppers will eventually hang to the right of the existing wall cabinets - above the stove.  You might be able to see the exposed portion of the suspension rail in the picture above where this cabinet will hang (click on image to zoom).

The picture above also shows the sink cabinet.  We moved it into the kitchen to start measuring for cut outs that our sink's plumbing will require.  The sink cabinet looks a little awkward because it's resting flat on the ground.  All of the base cabinets will all be raised off the ground about 4 inches once they are officially installed.

As if it wasn't obvious, our new fridge will be installed under the long cabinet protruding from the wall in the picture above.  We will also be installing floor-to-ceiling side panels on either side of that cabinet to make the fridge appear to be built in.  We will also add some sort of filler/crown moulding along the top of all wall cabinets so that there is no gap between them and the ceiling.

Blehhh.  I'm already babbling about enough random details for my brain to handle right now.  Time to beg for a back massage...