Wednesday night progress

Because our appliances are being delievered tomorrow, we wanted to ensure that the majority of the cabinet installation was complete before then.  We spent a couple more hours last night in the kitchen and, while it might look more chaotic than when we started, we actually got a lot accomplished.

The previous night was spent hanging the suspension rail along with most of the uppers.  Last night we started on the base cabinets.  The base cabinets come with adjustable feet that can be tweaked post-installation to ensure that everything is nice and level.  To make things easier on ourselves, we decided to install a ledger board that the back edge of the cabinets would rest on.  While many resources said that the legs were sufficient, we figured that starting with a level ledger board would give us an advantage in the cabinet-leveling game.  Because the floors and walls aren't completely straight, installing the ledger board wasn't the easiest of tasks.  Well, installing it was easy - figuring out where it should go was the hard part.  We didn't want it too high to create a noticeable gap between the bottom of the cabinets and the toe-kick and we didn't want it so low that we'd be hunched over our countertops for the next 50 years.  Once we found the sweet spot, we screwed the ledger board into the wall studs and the base cabinet install was fairly simple.

Admittedly, we only installed the two corner base cabinets because we need to make a few other tweaks in other areas first but those corner cabs are beasts!  We checked for level about 50 times and made minor adjustments to the leg height.  Joe was amazed that despite the right side of our kitchen being an entire inch higher than the left, the cabinets on either side of the room are completely level and at the same height.  One of these days he will give up on second guessing all of my ridiculous ideas and mathematical gibberish and just accept that I’m a genius.  ;)

We have to make a few more plumbing adjustments and will then install the sink cabinet under the window below.  There will then be a narrow cabinet to the right of the sink where we will eventually construct and install small drawers.  The cabinet to the right of the corner cabinet will be installed this weekend after we make adjustments to that opening to the right.  As it is now, the cabinet fits in that space but would hang over the trim work and look icky.  I wanted the largest possible bank of drawers in this space so making that doorway a couple inches smaller will be totally worth the extra storage space.  (That doorway is about 5ft. wide anyways so two inches won't make any difference.)  You will also see that the cabinets aren't totally assembled.  We only assembled the bases and will install the doors, drawers, shelves, etc. once everything is complete.  We don't want the appliance or counter installers to ding anything up!  (Photos below were taken from our iPad late last night so that's why they look a little hazy - we weren't rippin' it up with our rastafarian friends, I swear.)

We also secured the upper cabinets together so they are one, solid unit now as opposed to just being hung next to each other.  We didn't hang the other two uppers last night as planned because we didn't get around to moving the electrical box.  We think the new microwave will require a different outlet so we want to check on that before making any moves.

We have other things going on and won't be able to do any kitchen work tonight but we plan to kick things up a notch (BAM!) tomorrow night and over the weekend.  Our counters are being templated Monday morning so every base cabinet needs to be completely installed and in it's final location before then!  Yes, we work best under pressure.