Tag: cabinets

Blood Pressure Medicine

The new temporary staircase. Safer than the ladder hanging above the basement well.
Brand new, temporary staircase much better than the ladder for exploring upstairs. 

Keeping it real, I was pretty salty about my windows. That said, this is a good project–to date–because the only salt I’ve carried has been about those windows.

But no more. They were delivered. Finally.

There was more than one day when they were not delivered. Days that people said that they would be. And then, nothing. But we’re done with that. They are here. Propped up against the house. Staged for installation.

One of my new windows, in it's staging position. There's many more where that came from.

There’s a bunch of windows. I poked among the behemoths strewn along the foundation. I uncovered the big French door with the transom that will open my kitchen to the back porch. I got a little light-headed. My stomach did a mini-flip. My fingers started to tingle. Signs of excitement. Yes, Loyal Reader, it is becoming realer and realer.

But that’s not all. There’s been many a box left at the “Doc Residence.” Like those below.

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These particular boxes transported my new stainless steel satin finish kitchen sink, an industrial hanging light fixture for the dining room and one of the sconces for the back porch–they call it a barn light. There’s another box somewhere with it’s twin.

There’s also a box with the pro-style kitchen faucet that I can only describe using a whooshing sound spraying from my mouth accompanied by me waving my hand around simulating a hose clearing the coffee grounds down the drain.

There’s a couple of boxes of ceiling fans for the front porch. Did I tell you they had to remake the porch structure? It wasn’t actually attached to the house. Now it is. And the ceiling is a beautiful creamy white beadboard.

The new headboard ceiling on the porch. See also where the new fixtures--a pair of fans!--will go.

There’s a gazillion sheets of drywall and some Durock. The latter for the kitchen and bathroom walls. The Spouse says that it’s for tile and to keep dampness at bay.  The subway tile, the octagon tiles for the bathrooms and the black and white penny tiles for the entryway showed up last week, too.

There was a big truck that came by to goop up the walls with foam insulation. The Spouse is exceedingly excited by all things weatherproofing. I’m glad that someone is. My thing is the old house wasn’t drafty before–despite our old windows with an R-value of zero according to the window guy–but I will defer to the energy-saver.

This is the foam insulation surrounding the dining room windows. They protected the original woodwork. But doesn't it look like we should be hosting an Oktoberfest?

Last, but far from least, I walked onto the porch that was piled high with even MORE boxes today.

My cabinets have arrived! Here they are.

The boxes with my new cabinets. You can see the green, just beyond the bubble wrap.

There are a bunch of cabinet bases, a few very tall pantry sized boxes and a bunch of stuff wrapped in blue bubblewrap. I’ll figure out what that is another day. Okay. Not much to look at yet, but I’m not disturbing the staging.

You see, the drywall work begins tomorrow. Window and doors will be in place over the next few days, too. Purportedly, the new floor in the kitchen will get installed this week, then the heated floor over the Durock followed by tiling and grouting next week. If all goes to schedule, the cabinets will be in place at the end of that week.

If all goes to schedule. Yup, if all goes according to schedule, I’ll remain sodium-free. Stay tuned.

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Posted on by docthink 0

Can’t Tell Me Nothing

a black and white rendition of the SE corner of the current kitchen. There's a window that will go away, and a range sitting squarely there

The kitchen plans, of course, look good. Why on goddesses’ green earth would somebody give a client something that looks bad. See what I mean?

There’s a lot of time between encounters–encounters between the design/build folks and the client. And for those of you not quite following along, the client in the equation is me. Doc. I want it to be done. Complete. Finito.

Maybe this is less about being done, and more about my impatience. Be that as it may.

The problem is that Doc is actually obsessing about that last batch of drawings. The batch in possession is actually one conversation/version behind. So, the pix that I have do not actually incorporate all that we said. All that we agreed to. All that I want to be.

Well, that’s not exactly true. There are notes and arrows that acknowledge the changes–but you don’t see them all. Not totally. There is interpretation required. See. I’m obsessing. I told you.

So, as you know, pretty much every day I stand in different spots in the house and try to imagine what will be. I’m not saying that this is healthy. I’m just reporting the truth.

Today, I’m looking at the plans and seeing that there’s a problem. I’m looking at the edges and see that there are two corners in play. One on the southwest side. The other on the southeast side. The cabinets join at those corners. I’m wondering how the hell you get anything into or out of those spaces. It’s geometry. Angles and space. This is not looking good. The space is blocked.

And then I look, again, at the drawings. I see some weird words. On the plans it says:

Blind corner with pull out magic corner.

An image of one of the drawings that includes an indication that a pull-out-magic-corner will save the day. Fingers crossed.

Of course. Magic. That’s what I needed!

I go to the Google and ask about the “pull out magic corner.” It’s actually a real thing. I know this because one of the sellers is AmazonDotCom. Has to be legit.

It’s a few wire shelves that are connected and folded upon themselves. These shelves are attached to a cabinet door to provide access to the dark matter at the joining of the cabinetry. You pull the door open and the storage unfolds, four shelves for pots and pans or for mixers and bowls or for plastic containers and their snap on lids.

I’m feeling more confident. You can live through anything if magic made it.

Posted on by docthink 0

West Wing Shenanigans 

The 100 year old mantle peppered with candlesticks and pictures. I guess it's in the East Wing.

I’ve been to the White House before. I’ve nibbled on Christmas cookies in the East Wing during the Clinton administration, rolled Easter eggs on the South Lawn during the Bush years and, once, peered into the void as the door to the Situation Room briefly swung open during a West Wing tour with an Obama staffer. I didn’t see anything, by the way. I tried. 

Today I got an email with the subject line Cabinet Meeting. I swear to God I thought it was from the White House. Not lying. And I’m looking at it and wondering why they’d send it to my personal, versus work, email. Yeah. That was actually my first thought. Not a recognition that it would be highly unlikely–like impossible–that I’d have anything to do with a Cabinet meeting. 

Of course, it wasn’t from the EOP (that’s an insider’s way to say the executive office of the president). Of course, it was to set up a meeting to go over cabinetry and to walk through the updated kitchen elevations–the ones that freaked me out last week. 

I mean seriously. The cabinets are going in the East Wing of our house–in the Residence, not in the West Wing. Sheesh. 

Shenanigans!

Posted on by docthink 0

Moby Dick

The east wall run the current kitchen. Yeah. For reals. It's a stylized filter so you don't think it's so bad.

One of the pre-identified risks in this project is the possibility that I will not stay married. A disruption of this magnitude could fray the loosely woven cloth, nay, the net, of our union. At our core, the Spouse and I are incompatible.

To get this particular project moving–this project that has sat simmering, fermenting, fomenting and even festering for nigh on a generation–I extracted a promise. It was really quite clever of me. I asked that for my birthday present, the Spouse would give me boss status on the project. Final say on any disputed decision.

It was helpful that we were at the beach, that there was a post-sun beer or two and a lovely bottle of red that we drained along with grilled sea and farm fresh fare. With the Beast splayed on the cool tiles of the oddly large and mildly dysfunctional rental kitchen, his baleful hound dog eyes tracking the slow merry-go-round of the ceiling fan and with the red sun flaming the window over the sink (with a view of a yellow brick corporate mall that included the Piggly Wiggly) signaling the end of my birthday, a “yes” was extracted.

Yesterday we saw the kitchen elevations. And I wasn’t blown away. I was a little surprised. I thought that I would hear choirs of angels. Nope. No celestial movement.

Kitchen elevation of east wall. All cabinets.
It was the great white wall. A wall of cabinets that stretched to the very top of our ten foot ceilings. A great wall of white that ensconced and cocooned the rangetop. I railed against it. I was Ahab who needed to destroy that great white monster.

Working with the architect, we moved some storage blocks off of the counter. We replaced some closed cabinets with open shelves. We decided that the bottom cabinets would not be white. It was a great solution. We picked out some stuff, scheduled the next meeting and went about our day. But still, I wasn’t settled.

After work, I walked into the kitchen and imagined the storage space at the top of the room. What would I put in those cabinets? I’d need a real ladder to reach them. I stretched my hand above my head, as far as I could. I opened the current cabinets and stood on my tippy toes. I could barely touch the third shelf of these low ones. I could neither see nor touch anything in the back. I looked up to the ceiling again. It looked like a shear rock wall that I had no idea how to summit. I felt closed in. I felt claustrophobic.

I shook off the future kitchen plans and turned to the current meal plan. I worked on getting dinner together in my borderline decrepit kitchen. It was comfy. Most everything was in reach–mostly because the footprint was confined. Stuff was either right there or not in the room. But still, it was manageable. I was managing.

I plated the arugula, topped it with the burrata and scattered halves of heirloom cherry tomatoes and a few red onion strings around the mound of cheese. I crushed black pepper over the top and rained sea salt. I sliced the leftover roasted chicken and placed it on the other side of the plate. I drizzled a lemony pesto sauce on the chicken and finished the burrata and arugula with olive oil and a drop of the good balsamic.

The Spouse and I sat down to eat. I poured the wine that he had opened. I said that I wasn’t sure about the big wall of white. The Spouse said that he was surprised when I didn’t object to the enclosed exhaust hood. He was surprised because when I showed him images of what I liked, a hearth surround was not on the list. In fact, he noted that I liked the clean lines of an exposed stainless steel hood reaching to the ceiling and disparaged the hearths fashioned to look like a pizza oven or a fireplace.

He knew this because when I swiped through dozens of pictures that I amassed online, those times when I thought his nodding head was a signal to move along, he was actually paying attention. And that his nods indicated that he understood. 

Now I saw the white monster in its true form. It was the closed-in range. I wanted freedom to cook and create, but the design of the cabinetry was closing in.

But here’s the thing. I didn’t know he was listening. But he was. And he fixed it. What a dope. Me, that is.

So, really, the secret to our marriage is that we are incompatible. At least that’s what I say it is. And I’m in charge of this project.

Posted on by docthink 0