Well, we made another pretty huge dent today in the cabinets. The key to the process is just finding your flow and thankfully once you’ve built a couple, they’re all basically the same. We weren’t able to finish the tall cabinets still because we didn’t want to make a trip home to get the right catalog and then back again since it would waste so much time so we figure we will sleep in our comfy bed tonight (versus the air matress which has a leak thanks to doggo and needs to be turned on to suck in more air at least once a night – amazingly enough that usually doesn’t wake hubby who is a pretty light sleeper anyway and that thing is loud) and we’ll come back tomorrow to hopefully finish up the rest of the cabinets.
At 1:30 pm, we had managed to build another two cabinets (that seems so pathetic but one of them was pretty big and there were lots of drawers which take a while to assemble) and then we realized that we didn’t have enough feet to get the rest of the cabinets in the island to stand up together to the same height. The other half of the island cabinets are actually wall cabinets and don’t have the holes for the feet which I guess is why they didn’t give us the feet along with the order even though we told him how we intended to use the cabinets.
So this meant we needed to make a run to Hagebau (the little home improvement store about 10 minutes from us which is getting a ton of business lately – think Ace Hardware) where we hoped to find feet which would allow us to achieve the same height as the feet we’d already installed on the rest of the cabinets. Naturally, that was not an option and the feet we already have will only go so high which meant we needed all new feet for the island(24 in total). This also means the island will be a bit higher than the rest of the cabinets but we’re thinking this will be rather beneficial since both of us are pretty tall and we’ve commented a few times that the cabinets in our current house are a bit too low when you’re cutting things and so on…so we’ll see what this new experience will yield.
We’ll also have to come up with a new trim for the bottom of the cabinets since the one we bought which matches the cabinets will be too short now and they don’t make them in other widths (that we know of). Why not just leave it open? Well we could do that but we’d end up growing another Newfie under there in a matter of days and unfortunately most of the feet are mix and match under the cabinets since we practically had to buy our their entire stock of feet. We also had to get a bit creative when we realized that the little screw in adjustment feet which go into the bottom of the foot itself had two different sized screws…and of course only some of them actually fit the feet we had. Going back to Hagebau was not an option because we bought all the screw in feet that they had in stock (hence we ended up with the wrong ones I guess) and we really didn’t have the time to keep making trips here and there.
Our final solution came as one of those light bulb moments like you see in cartoons with it suddenly blinking on over your head…why not use a bolt to secure the foot screw in place and then we would once again have the correct heights all around the island.
A few hours later, we were finally ready to call it quits. The entire island had been constructed and the first oven installed as well as the hanging cabinets to go on the wall above the sink. Of course that wasn’t totally without a bit of drama as well. I apparently ordered the wrong width on a few of the cabinets and we didn’t think to double check it until it was too late. So we decided to keep the wider cabinets and will buy a shelf for the end to match up the length…another trip to IKEA is in the very near future.
Ayla stayed nearby during most of the project and made sure we were doing everything right. Thank goodness we ended up with such a mellow dog who can be content sleeping in the cold corner while anchored to the new radiators. We unfortunately couldn’t let her roam freely in the house because the guy had sealed the floors and we didn’t want her to mess anything up but she accepted the fate well.
