Starting to look like a real kitchen

An article by Rachel    1 Comment

Today Leonard and Alex worked on plumbing and finishing up electrical work. Then they installed the range hood, a Broan ‘Best’ 36 inch. It is quiet yet really powerful. It will be so nice to get heat out of the house instead of hearing the fire alarm go off every time Alex cooks.

vent hood

I worked on cleaning up after the boys and building cabinets. The first three boxes (including the sink cabinet below) were easy peasy.

sink cabinet

Then I dug in to the skinny (12 7/8 inch deep vs. standard 24 inch) cabinets to go below the pass through on the kitchen side and opposite the range.

I was really confused because everything we had left looked like a wall cabinet. Digging into our order, I realized everything ordered was wall cabinets. I did some research on IkeaFans and found that indeed skinny cabinets are wall boxes. Fine.

I opened up one of our 5 18 inch skinny cabinets to start building. It wasn’t quite lining up as I thought it should. Finally when I got to the back, I called Alex in to consult on the direction of the back. We realized that the whole thing was the wrong orientation. Instead 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide, it was 30 inches wide and 18 inches tall. With a lot of work we could modify this to work, but it didn’t seem right.

I called our localish (Cincinnati) IKEA and talked to someone in the kitchen department. He confirmed that we should have received 18 x 30 cabinets and the ones we had were all wrong. He said to take the cabinet apart carefully and we could return for the right cabinets, which they have in stock. Great.

So now we’ll spend Alex’s last day off work driving to Cinci to exchange cabinets instead of building and installing cabinets. At least we can see our good friends Kevin and Maureen while we’re there.

To end the day on an up note, Lil helped me build three doors for one cabinet so we could see the whole thing put together. Looks good, don’t you think?

cabinet with doors

(I apologize for the spotty quality of the photos. I’m using my phone (T-Mobile G1) because it’s easier than the camera to upload to the web.)