First, wall repair. The crew made the previously large holes in our kitchen walls even bigger (no documentary evidence exists of this frightening time in our kitchen's day). Then they got to work putting up new wallboard (or whatever you call it) and skim coating the whole mess. Although we'll have to re-paint most everything in the business parts of the kitchen, this really feels like progress! The rest of the kitchen still looks great, so our painting wasn't a total waste.
The hole in the middle of the wall is for an electrical outlet. The hole on the right is for the garbage disposal switch.
The hole up top is for the microwave. No word from the electrician on whether that was already a dedicated circuit but also no word on a change order, so I assume we're fine (famous last words? we'll see...). The two wires sticking out of the wall are for under-cabinet lighting and the three holes below that are for electrical outlets. The bottom hole is for the stove's electrical outlet.
Big lesson here - we would NEVER have been able to do this within the appropriate timeline (i.e., today) and without messing something up. This would have taken us a whole weekend at least and there isn't a weekend coming for a few days. We would have forfeited Tuesday through Friday of professional work, probably made the crew mad, and totally ruined everything. This is the part where I sheepishly thank Tony for thinking I was too much of a girl to repair my own wallboard BECAUSE I TOTALLY AM.
The same two guys (brothers) who fixed up our walls were also the guys with the big truck to haul our junk away. Mind you, we did not pay for anyone to haul away our junk, but this is another place where Tony decided to "help us out." Thanks Tony!
We wanted to donate the old kitchen cabinets to ReStore, a great organization that sells used construction materials and household goods and then gives all the profits to Habitat for Humanity. When we were taking out the bottom cabinets, they got pretty banged up either because we had to dismantle them to get them off of the wall or because they were too flimsy to begin with. We planned to put small parts of the lower cabinets in the trash each week (to avoid angering our already-grouchy garbage man) and donate the uppers. Our guest room has been full of upper cabinets for over a week now, ready for donation.
I called the ReStore today to see if they picked up cabinets or if we had to drop them off. Do you know what the guy told me? "I don't think I'm interested in just upper cabinets." He was sort of snooty about it, which pissed me off, but he had a point. Who wants to buy a set of just upper cabinets? I think their goal is to sell complete kitchens, not parts of kitchens, which makes a great deal of sense.
It sure was a good thing that there were nice men with a large truck at my house! Such serendipity! Drew helped the guys haul the stuff to the truck and, on the way, some guys working on a nearby building took our sink and all the knobs off of the cabinets. In the harsh light of day those were honestly the only parts of the old kitchen that were *really* suitable for donation, so it all came out okay I guess.
And now? Our guest room/future nursery is void of cabinets, as is the back porch. BLISS. That was one huge step that was going to be a PITA to solve, let me tell you.
Tomorrow, John the Jobsite Manager comes back to start installing cabinets. We can't paint for 3-5 days, so I think we'll end up having to do some fancy taping around the installed cabinets, but that's okay.
More tomorrow!
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