As in, they take their sweet time. Yesterday was installation day 1, and it didn’t quite go exactly as planned. But then again, nothing in home improvement ever does.
It can best be compared to Christmas morning as a child when you can hardly sleep the night before, anxiously awaiting the crack of dawn so you can rip into all of those carefully wrapped gifts from “Santa.” John and I stayed up late and woke up early excitedly chattering about the long awaited installation. Remember, we’ve been completely kitchenless for close to two months (no cabinets, no counters, no sink, no nothing) so imagine our excitement at the prospect of seeing all of our cabinets out of their boxes and into their final resting places.
And the day started out well. It wasn’t until about an hour into the installation when I got the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news. One of our two corner base cabinets was reversed. In other words, they sent us two righties instead of a rightie and a leftie. Although KraftMaid has rushed to correct their mistake, it’s still gonna be about 2 weeks (!) before the new cabinet arrives. Boo! The kitchen was on schedule to be done by the 19th, but now we’ll be lucky to have a finished kitchen by early January.
And that’s how the Grinch stole our Christmas kitchen.
In the meantime, our installer has decided to forge ahead with all the other cabinets. Here’s what the kitchen looked like on Sunday night:
And what it looked like on Monday night:
We can’t believe the amazing amount of storage in our extra tall 42 inch upper cabinets. Burger (in his Christmas sweater) and I can practically live inside:
I guess the cabinet debacle is just another lesson that nothing ever comes easy… but when it’s all said and done it’s nothing short of miraculous. Even if our kitchen is fashionably late, at least we’ll have the rest of our lives to enjoy it.
nice kitchen..
I adore the color of your kitchen walls! I recently purchased my first home. The cabinets are white as well and I desperately need a color for the walls. I can’t seem to find anything that looks right. I would love to know what color your walls (gentle tide) compares to at SHERWIN WILLIAMS….I need help!
oo
Sonni
Hey Sonni,
Just get them to color match it! Bringing in a swatch of paint is as easy as pie, and you get a perfect match in that Sherwin William’s paint you love. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
i was trying to look back over your kitchen cabinet ordering/installation process as we are currently going through the same thing…i’m sorry if it was mentioned elsewhere…i really did try and look, but you used home depot to do the cabinet installation? is it cheaper to use them as opposed to a general contractor?
Yup, we used Home Depot’s installers because their labor charges were extremely reasonable and they had a cap (so even if it took them extra time to do something, it wasn’t extra money). You can always find someone to do anything cheaper (especially on craigslist these days) but we knew the guys at Home Depot would do it well and would have to answer to their giant corporation if we didn’t like their work- and again they had great rates too. We would highly recommend going that route if you’re doing Home Depot cabinetry. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
We got HD cabinets too! But Nathan installed them himself… so we were luckily only out of a kitchen for a week (I’m impressed that you managed for so long without one). Question. I love the look of the cabinets going almost up to the ceiling, but… could you reach anything in them? I feel like I’d have to invest in a stepping stool…
Yes, getting anything on the top two shelves called for a stepstool for me. John could reach all but the top one – and sometimes could grab things up there on his toes) so we put less-often-used stuff up there!
xo,
s
Only 7 comments on this post?! My how your readership has grown!!
Okay, my question is this…knowing what you know now…if you could go back, would you still go the same route or would you do it differently (buy used cabinets, fix up the existing ones, etc)??
Thanks!
We’re already talking about how we got new Kraftmaid cabs in our first house, used what we had in our current house (just repainted them) and next time we’d love to try an Ikea kitchen! We hear such good things about them! Haha. I think all of those solutions have their perks (different budget, amount of work, etc). Since our first house’s layout and size of those cabinet would never work for us, we pretty much had to replace them and never regretted our choice though! They felt so nice and we think they helped sell the house so fast!
xo,
s
Hi,
I know this is an old post. I hope you can find time to answer a few questions. I just spent an hour searching for some more info on your cabinet design experience for this kitchen and can’t find it.
Basically I am reading many places NOT to put 42 inch uppers in a kitchen with 8 fit ceilings because they will come down too close to the countertops. Did this house have 8 ft ceilings? Do you recall what the distance is between your countertops and uppers?
I also wonder if euro style/full overlay cabinets on uppers would be in danger of hitting the ceiling when you open them if 42’s were installed closer to the ceiling than yours (like, all the way with a little scribe molding).
Anyway, maybe you had 9ft ceilings. But, I am hoping you had 8 footers and some advice.
Oh man, we don’t live there anymore, but it did have 8′ ceilings. I’m not sure about how much room was between the counter and the upper cabs but it felt standard and our blender and stuff fit under it, if that helps! As for if the upper cabs could hit the ceiling, as long as they don’t go past the top frame of the cabinet (I can’t imagine they would) I doubt they could hit the ceiling since the top frame of the cabinet would be up there and then you’d have the scribe molding. Hope it helps!
xo
s
Thank you so much for dredging that knowledge out of your past. I needed the moral support!
Haha, good luck with everything!
xo
s