Day 9: the end is in sight

Bet y'all are happy that soon the big payoff will be posted! I sure am happy that there’ll be a big payoff to post soon, personally.

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Today was mostly odds and ends; the contractor came in himself to put some finishing touches on things. In particular:

  • Finished mudding/surfacing the walls
  • Installed the tip-on spring for the wall cabinet
  • Got the stove and dishwasher closer to their final location
  • Patched up a bunch of wood (both the beams and the ceiling-floorboards downstairs, and some of the living room floor upstairs although getting to one set of holes is going to require moving all my heckin' furniture around)

The dishwasher I got turns out to be about 4" shorter than a typical cabinet. The height is pretty adjustable but even at its highest it’s going to need some filler trim pieces to fill in a gap. Fortunately there’s plenty of stuff that can be used for that, such as the filler panel above the fridge that I didn’t want in the first place, or the random discarded filler pieces from the ongoing cabinet-placement debacle.

The wall cabinet was installed with the wrong hinges for the tip-on opener. Fortunately there were some of the correct hinge type, but there were only three of them. I took the initiative to swap them out anyway and it’s a lot better than before, but I still think I’d rather have a handle on the door rather than the tip-on opener. If I can get the designer to actually, like, tell me what handles I have, I can just fix all that myself.

The interior of the wall cabinet also has a bunch of grodiness to it thanks to the previous incorrect installation, and also the contractor had trouble positioning the tip-on correctly so if I were to switch to a traditional handle (and go back to the soft-close hinges) I’d probably want to find some gray filler putty to fill in those screw holes. It’s just a utility cabinet anyway so it’s not a huge deal (I’m keeping cleaning supplies and cat food in there) but it’d still be nice to at least pretend it was always the way I wanted it.

Anyway. Tomorrow the countertops go in! And then Thursday the sink/plumbing/appliances get final installation! And then I have a working kitchen again! I’ll just need to paint the walls and then it’ll be essentially done, at least for the initial project scope.

All that’ll be left after that is fixing the over-fridge storage situation. Because of some last-minute countertop shenanigans (the designer forgot to include the bar top in the estimate, and that took an additional slab, which increased my cost by $2700! Holy heck!) he’s agreed to pay for the materials for the over-fridge cabinet, at least.

Also my mom had a good idea of using some of the slab offcuts to get a pastry board. After I asked about that and the countertop folks said that they’d be happy to include one, it occurred to me that I’d actually rather have 2cm, rather than 3cm, slab (to get a thinner backsplash, mostly, and also that would have probably reduced the price considerably), but unfortunately it was too late to change that as the countertops had already gone to manufacturing. Oh well. 3cm will look nice anyway, I mean there’s a reason I opted for that in the first place.

I also don’t know if there’s going to be a filler piece for behind the stove. The stove itself comes with some metal filler trim but it’s not quite thick enough to reach the wall with how far out the stove needs to be. I can get the stove a lot closer (and also eschew the filler trim entirely) if I get the electrician to relocate the 240V outlet. Considering that my original estimate had included the installation of a new 240V (because I thought the old stove might have been hard-wired) I think that’ll be quite doable. The electrician isn’t sure if relocating it will be that easy but he’ll see what he can do on Friday. All things considered I’d rather not use the stove’s filler piece if I don’t have to, and if I can get a nice flush installation, even better.

I have considerable mental damage around the final stove trim/installation from my San Francisco condo and I’m glad to see that even in the worst case it’s not going to be particularly bad!

Oh, and last night I used my cast-iron pan on the new stove. It heats up really fast – like it came up to temperature in seconds. I am very looking forward to cooking with something faster and more responsive than gas again. I’m also going to have to race my stovetop kettle against my electric standalone kettle. The electric kettle has the advantage of all the energy going directly into the heating element, but the stovetop kettle has the advantage of a ridiculously powerful 240V induction coil, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be going back to stovetop for my future water heating. (That said, my electric kettle is nice and has a lot going for it in terms of convenience and ease-of-use.)

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