busybee

When my old kitchen was being demolished I noticed that there were signs of mouse droppings in my sink cabinet, but no signs of mice. I also noticed that there were a bunch of gaps in the drywall behind the sink, and because of the… odd construction of this historical building it seemed likely that mice were able to occasionally get in, but didn’t stick around since they had nowhere to go.

Well, last night while working at the computer I felt something furry brush against my foot, and I looked down and it wasn’t Fiona. Then a few minutes later I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and a little mouse peeked out from under my equipment shelving system and then scurried back underneath. (Fiona was, of course, asleep nearby and didn’t seem interested in me gesticulating at said shelving system.)

This was the day of finishing. It… isn’t quite finished. (Is anything, really?)

But what’s left to do can wait.

Today saw the electrical work happen. It went well.

Was this the last day?! Well, no, but I finally have a functional kitchen again!

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.

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!

Two things happened today of note:

1. My new audio interface (affiliate link) arrived
2. The demolition on my kitchen happened

Neither are things I really wanted to have to, y'know, spend this kind of money on right now, but they were both necessary. If badly-timed.

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