December 2007

At the end of November and the first of December I worked on the living room side of the wall behind the sink and dishwasher in preperation for the installation of the counter top. Taping and bedding were getting easier as I learned by doing.

Having finished the painting of the cabinets, we began in earnest on the cabinet doors. There are a million of them! Most were existing, but I had to custom cut several to fit the cabinets that had been modified. Fortunately, the cabinets in the bathroom were of identical construction. Since they would not be used in the future bathroom renovation, we had plenty of matching material and hardware to canabalize. In most cases I merely had to make two cuts to resize a door to fit the kitchen. In a few cases I only had to make one. My wife sanded each one. We layed out and drilled the holes for the knobs and drawer pulls. Then we started priming and painting.

In November, before installing the new range, I had to convert it from Natural Gas to Liquid Petroleum. This was a relatively simple, but multi-step project involving changing and adjusting the gas orifices with parts and instructions from the included conversion kit.

On the 7th I purchased a regulator and connection fittings, hooked up a temporary tank, and turned on the gas. My conversion proved successful. All the burners lit and none required adjustment.

For dinner we had lasagna. It was too warm a day (record high temperatures, actually) for such a heavy meal, but it had been so long since we had been able to bake anything. We couldn't help ourselves. Yea! We have an oven!

On the 14th I installed all the drawers. I needed to accomplish this before the counter top went in because each drawer's glides had to be adjusted and alligned. This was much easier to do from the top than it would have been from the front.

On the 15th the installers came and intstalled our counter top. I installed the faucet and garbage disposal. I hooked up the water and sink drain. It took three trips to the store! Wouldn't you know it? The plumbing kicked my butt!

I wanted to take another progression shot, but before I could get to the camera, my wife moved in and set up shop. I couldn't blame her, though. This renovation has taken far too long and with it's partially working, unevenly burning stove and drippy faucet, the downstairs kitchen was horrible.

On the 16th I turned off the hot water to the downstairs sink and finally stopped the drip, drip, drip. I moved the old stove out to the driveway for later disposal and hooked up a gas space heater in it's place. I moved the table and chairs upstairs—putting them temporarily in the living room, pending installation of the kitchen floor.

From the beginning, I had had concerns about the adjustability of the range once the counter top was installed. Starting with the measuring, and continuing through the installation, the finished height was changed twice. I agreed to these changes, but at each step in the process it seemed that the installers were putting the material too tightly against the appliance. I kept asking about it, and the fabricators kept assuring me that it would be adjustable and removable.

Two days after the installation, when I tried to raise the range to bring it flush with the counter, I found that I could not. The counter was, in fact, too tight against it. Further investigation revealed that the space between the opposing edges of the counter was slightly closer at the front than it was at the back. When I attempted to slide the range forward to disengage the back leg from the anti-tip bracket, it got even tighter. I risked damaging our brand new range and counter top. Adjustment was completely impossible. Another shining example of why I hate letting other people work on my house!

I stopped trying and instead wrote a letter to the store where we had purchased the job, and to the fabricator. In it I spelled out the chain of events that had brought us to this dilemma. I hand delivered the letter to the store’s manager. We had a short discussion and he immediately called the fabricator to set up a time for their installer to come back and make it right.

On the 28th the installers arrived to fix the counter top. They had to pull it off the cabinets. This was not an easy task, but they managed to do it without destroying anything. They took it outside, trimmed a 1/4" inch off of it, and then reinstalled it. This time we all made certain that the range fit before they left.

In the meantime, we worked on shelf paper so that we could stock the cabinets prior to reinstalling the doors.

And so, over the remainder of the month, a few at a time, I hung all million cabinet doors. Utilizing the existing screw holes wherever I could, most went on easily.

Nonetheless, some were miss-aligned to start with. These I straightened by repositioning one or both hinges. Moving a screw an 1/8" in wood is tricky because the screw will slip back into the existing hole. I filled the unwanted holes by inserting toothpicks coated with wood glue into them. Then I broke the toothpicks off flush with the surface of the cabinets. A few minutes of drying time, and I was ready to make the new holes.

I also had to position six doors from scratch because the cabinets they went on were new or modified from the original.