...During...

So Tuesday the cabinets came, and I also had to go to work to turn in my resignation. And the old cabinets were supposed to be torn out. It all happened, but it was a bit more... unplanned than I had expected.

Cabinets began to arrive at about 0900. But there were no countertops. This was all a bit of stupid confusion because I had to put the cabinets and tops on separate checks, but in any event there were no countertops in the truck. Uh-oh. More of the saga follows the jump, with pictures!

I was also deeply confused by the fact that the guys who delivered the new cabinets weren't going to remove the old ones. I thought it would all be the same crew--delivery, tear-out, and install--but clearly I was wrong. No complaints, though; home construction is pretty flat right now so if the cabinet company wants to hire more subcontractors and spread the work around that's fine by me.

I tried to call the cabinet company three or four times to find out when the tear-out guy would arrive, but we kept playing phone tag and I never got an answer. So I waited. Around noon I decided I was going to go to the base to turn in my paperwork... and as I was getting ready to go, the countertops arrived. I called the cabinet place to say they'd arrived, and they said the tear-out guy would be there within the hour. It's a forty-minute round-trip commute to the base assuming no traffic, so I didn't want to leave. And the carpenter did come and tore out the cabinets.

This was made more difficult by the dishwasher. Now, I did manage to disconnect and remove the old dishwasher. It resulted in a flooded kitchen, but that was due to the obvious oversight of failing to turn off the water to a device that hadn't worked in over three years and not anything I did wrong in the disconnection. This time I did turn the water off (hooray!) so there was no flooding. But what I couldn't do was disconnect the wiring. The old dishwasher was easy: two wires and ground came in through a metal tube, and they connected to two wires and a screw on the dishwasher. This newfangled thing, I love it, I really do, but I would need a degree to understand the schematic that explains what happens to those two wires and the ground that come in from the wall. There are over a dozen connections under there. Now I understand why it took the installer almost two hours to get the thing installed. I wasn't about to play with disconnecting that, so I cut the power off at the fuse box and told the carpenter to be very careful.

He was working alone. No doubt in better days he'd have brought an assistant along, but the construction economy being what it is I don't think he could afford it and still keep his own bank account in the black. I helped out a little around the dishwasher and sink plumbing and he borrowed some of my tools (hard as that is to believe).

And when he was all done, I fled to the base as quick as I could, turned in my resignation, chatted with one of my stable of replacements, and left, having spent less than ten minutes in the office total. Sweet. I like a day like that.

Sadly, I did not take any pictures of the kitchen with no cabinets in it. You'll have to satisfy yourself with this selection.
First we have the cabinets along the sink/dishwasher wall. Note that the sink looks naked without its faucet. Poor sink. See the shiny new dishwasher? It doesn't look nearly as out of place now, with new cabinets and counters and floors around. Notice the corner cabinets up above? There was at least four cubic feet of dead space in that corner, probably six.

Here we have the insanely large empty space from the corner where the fridge is. Note that there is like 30" of dead space next to the fridge. That could be quality counterspace, for goodness sake! Now all it is is paper grocery-sack storage. Oh, and that upright vacuum cleaner, but it needs to have a belt replaced and I'm just going to donate it to somebody and adopt Smittygirl's.

This is the hideous linoleum floor. At one time I believe this might have been white, but the color you see there is the actual color. No photoshop here; none was needed.

And in this picture you can see the tiny countertop between fridge and stove. This was barely big enough for a crockpot. And yet there was so much dead space next to the fridge. Needless to say we corrected that problem. Note also the lovely stove hood sitting on the counter. This picture was obviously taken post-victory in my battle with the hex cap screws. Please note, I pushed the stove back in to take the picture; I wasn't trying to remove the hood with the stove still in place. I'm not quite that boneheaded.

Finally, my least favorite aspect of the kitchen when I was a bachelor was this asinine little cabinet. The door opening was four inches across. Think about that, that is half the span from your thumb to your pinkie. You can't even put a large box of corn flakes in there. The cabinet went all the back to the corner, but you couldn't put anything in there. Tons of wasted space. And the best part was that there was no cabinet wall next to the dishwasher. Cinders once got into that cabinet and made his way back around behind the dishwasher. I heard him crying in there. Thank goodness he found his way out when I rattled his food dish or else I'd have been tearing out the cabinets myself to rescue him.