Kitchen Remodel: So Close, Yet...

Today we took delivery of our upper cabinets that now have shelves:

One might think that we would be dancing in the streets now that they're in place, huh? But take a look at the shots below. Notice anything missing?

Yup, all the doors. Turns out that when we were told that someone would come out and do any cosmetic touch-ups to the paint, it didn't mean some guy with a can of paint and an array of brushes. It meant bringing out a compressor, paint gun, and taking off all the doors so they could be painted in our back yard. That would be after filling a number of gaps we found with wood putty and then sanding it down. And did I mention that we were told today that the paint guy only has two speeds: low and slow?

It was painfully clear that there wouldn't be enough daylight left today to get it all done. So it was agreed that all the doors would be removed, taken back to the shop, prettied up, painted, and hopefully return here on Saturday. Sigh.

On the high side, I can start loading up the new upper cabinets and restore some semblence of organization to the kitchen. That's between times of shooing the cat from the open bottom cupboards.

Kitchen Remodel: New Cabinets, Counters, Island Update

So on Wednesday I wrote about where we stand with our efforts in our kitchen project and had a bit of a crankypants rant because of not being able to get an update from our contractor. Well lo and behold, we received a call on Thursday from our contractor's partner asking if we could come by the shop on Friday afternoon to take a look at what they've been up to these last several weeks.

The first piece we looked at was the island and its countertop:

Side view of island and counter

This is a seven foot long run, which will provide ample work space. The counter is comprised of various local woods, which when cleaned up and varnished will take on a darker hue than what this shot suggests. The riser you see on the right side is part of the support for the glass bar top that we still need to have made. That is a story unto itself, which I'll share in an upcoming post.

While I couldn't get a good shot of the island from the front, you can see from our design that it will have three cupboard doors, behind which will contain pull out shelves. We also incorporated an open shelving unit on the right side for our cutting boards and baking sheets. Four drawers sit about the cupboards where I can store prep items and gadgets.

The crew also had been working on the cabinets that will run on either side of the range. Here's a shot of the smaller piece:

On both the long and short counters, they had laid out wood strips that were far lighter than what we asked for. There were also a number of very short pieces that broke the flow. Those will be taken out, and the blond pieces will be swapped out for darker ones. 

Another change we made was to rearrange some of the wood pieces on the long counter run. See the black/blond strip here in the middle? In person, it's really very pretty.

Well, apparently it's also very pricey. The way they had laid out the strips on the long counter run, pieces of this wood would be exactly where the sink would be, meaning they would all have to be cut out. Didn't seem to make much sense to us, which is why we asked to have the design rearranged.

In other news, the cupboard doors are in the process of being made:

The only change we made to the overall look was to have the inside edge to the frame be cut with a round edge versus a straight one.

The good news is that work is progressing and there's a possibility that painting the cabinets could start in the next couple of weeks. The bad news is that we still don't have an estimated finish date. We made it clear that we weren't looking for something written in stone, just a ballpark timeframe. Thanksgiving? Christmas? Easter? At least, Easter was taken off the table. But for whatever reason, there seem to be some commitment issues. 

So now we will see what information we can get from the owner, but have already been forewarned that he can be difficult to reach by phone and the times he is actually in the shop are erratic. Great.

In the meantime, we will press ahead and get whatever work we need to do out of the way, except for cutting the sink pipes and doing the cement work to cover the tile voids. I suppose worst case scenario is that the crew doing the cabinet work gets done before we have the plumbing and cement work finished. In that case, they'll just have to keep the cabinets in their shop until we're ready for delivery. One way or another, we'll get it figured out, but jeez, it doesn't seem to have to be this complicated.