fluffy rambles (Remodel)

Countertops are in! Yay!

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.

Not a lot to show today, but it’s coming really close to completion!

Today my stove and dishwasher arrived. I wired up the stove’s power cord and found that I need to properly level it before it’ll slide in and I was worried about damaging my cabinets, so I decided to wait for the contractor to be able to take care of it. But I did at least get a chance to try it out with my cast-iron pan (affiliated link). It’s pretty quiet, and gives much better temperature control than the induction hotplate (affiliated link) I’ve been using in the meantime; the Max Burton seems to be like… low hot HOT HOTTT HOTTTTTT!!!! HOTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!! PLASMABALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and then there’s 5 more heat settings. This one isn’t like that.

Today the countertop folks came in and did their measurements, and I put a bunch more stuff away.

One of the bits that was left over from the installation was an extra lighting module, which seems to be the same as the ones that are installed. It’s an L&S Nova Emotion, which it turns out has a bunch of features that are available with the matching driver.

Mine didn’t come with the matching driver.

Well okay it’s not that many features, but it has variable color temperature (and possibly brightness?), and Bluetooth remote control support, as well as touch control built-in.

Sorry about the sudden backfill of entries; I was posting progress photos on Facebook (mostly for my mom’s benefit) but the response to them has been positive enough that I figured I’d also post them here. Some of the text might be redundant as a result with other things I posted about here already.

I also did my best to merge the Facebook version of the day 5 demi-disaster with this one but it ends up a little weird. Anyway there’s photos now in case you already read that entry.

Huge progress. All of the cabinets are in the right place, the range hood is installed in a way that DOESN’T have spikes coming up from my living room floor, and the electrician also came and finally updated my outlets to GFIs (which I’ve only been putting off for the past 8 years) while also adding the switched outlet for the under-cabinet lights.

No real progress today, instead the contractor came and looked over the installation variances from yesterday and we formulated a plan to fix everything. Mostly just took down the range hood (and settled on a new solution with HUGE thanks to Spud for some much-appreciated unsolicited design work), and two of the base cabinets got moved 3" to the left. Oh and the hole in the wall next to my phone got bigger.

It wouldn’t be a kitchen remodel without some major screw-up, right? Well today one finally happened.

Ah, I thought that was going too smoothly.

What’s the old saying? Measure twice, cut once?

Partial cabinet installation! It’s starting to look like something!

Took delivery of the new cabinets. Actual install work hasn’t been scheduled; maybe Monday, maybe tomorrow, maybe in two weeks, who knows! Also this is real-life Sokoban. My little temporary kitchen becomes even more unwieldy. Guess I’ll be eating out for the next little while.

Demolition! Or: a farewell to shitty cabinets.

Day 0: scrambling to move my stuff out of the kitchen because I found out demolition was going to happen the next day without warning