push 'em in and then pull them back out

I had all of my base cabinets pushed into place and even leveled this week. Then we realized that we need to have baseboard installed. If water runs across the floor and there is no baseboard, the drywall with just suck up all that moisture.


So, pull them all back out again. Put up the trim, paint and caulk the the trim and shove them all back into place. Re-level them all since I had to move them an inch to the right. Yes, the floor varies that much.

I am hoping to have them screwed to the wall sometime this morning. Only question I have is, how so you decided how far they should come out from the wall and what is parallel to a wall that isn't flat?

MISTAKES - more bad measureing

The sink side of the kitchen has a 5 inch gap at the end. ugly
Oh well, I will just have to live with that

The stove side of the kitchen has a inch of cabinet poking past the doorway. oops
Okay, I go and get a 24" base cabinet and find another use for a 30" base cabinet.

The plug for the microwave is set outside the width of the tall, deep cabinet. stupid
That should have been a easy measurement. That will be a easy fix, the wall behind it is not drywalled yet.

I am sure I had the kitchen designed before the electrical went in. Why didn't I just draw the cabinets onto the floor?

I don't know how I made all these mistakes. No I take that back, I know how some of them came about. The light switch was installed without my input and I knew it was in a bad place, there just wasn't anywhere else to put it. What I should have done was measure out the cabinets before we assembled them, so we could return them. (I have enough extra now to start a wall of cabinets in the basement)

Biggest problem isn't the non returnable cabinets, I am sure I will find a use for them, it is that whenever I need a new cabinet from IKEA, I can buy the basic frame and take it with me. But I have to special order in all the doors and either pay shipping from Salt Lake City or drive there and get them myself.

And now I have to make a second special order and that will mean a second special trip to SLC.

I did want to put all the base cabinets in their places and look it over weeks ago and my husband said, "Why bother?"

starting on the base cabinets

We decided to go with the Capita legs and forget the little plastic legs and the toe kick boards. I saw this done on IKEA FANS site - someone had posted pictures of their kitchen and the dark wood with light cabinets looked great on those chrome legs. We picked up the legs last week and got them all screwed on this Sunday.

the wall cabinet vs light switch fix is up

We hit IKEA last week when we were in Salt Lake taking the kids to Lagoon. We picked up two 30"x30" wall cabinets to replace the 2 39"x30" cabinets that interfered with a badly placed light switch. I think it is a pretty good solution after all. It will look like we designed that way.

back to work!

The floor is finished. Yeah!

We had a major set back when the first install of the floor was a disaster. It looks like Lumber Liquidators gave us a bunch of 'Odd Lot' boxes instead of 'Select' Flooring. Translated that means we got boxes full of tapered pieces, or ones that were thinner than normal or ones that had miss cut grooves. We found this out after a room and a half had been finished. It took 2 weeks at least to get LL to correct the problem and replace the floor.

Gee, another whole month of nothing getting done on my house remodel. No wonder 4 to 6 weeks is now into its 7th month.

MISTAKE - that window is not where I need it to be

This is something I can't correct. I needed the edge of the window to be 76" from the left edge of the room. It ended up at 75". The problem is that I have exactly 75" of base cabinets going in on that wall and I will need an inch at the end for the cabinet door to open.

I guess it will only be noticeable to me, that the sink is off by an inch from the window, I hope.

The other side is ending up with a huge gap at the end because of this problem. I have to have both sets of upper cabinets the same distance to the edge of the window. Since the left side is now at 8 inches instead of 9, the right side had to move over an inch. An inch shouldn't be a problem but I had already factored in an inch at the wall and a inch at the side of the frig. That brings the gap to 3 inches along the wall cabinets above the frig. Well it should be 3 inches but it is actually 5 inches. Oh yeah, that wall leans out at the top. Too bad, extra space at the bottom might be useful along the side of the frig. That is where my mother hides her broom and dust pan.

the first cabinets to be set in place

These three are now up to stay! Yeah!

We even tried out one of the doors. If you don't get your hinges to 'CLICK!' like the instruction show, you have probably installed the inside the cabinet part backwards.

The IKEA FAN site saved us from spending hours trying to figure out why the hinges wouldn't go together.

We have to wait until next week to pick up the replacement 30" x 30" wall cabinet to finish this side.