July 1 Cabinets Installed!

Today the cabinets were installed. As you can see by the photo, the finishing touches, like the correct doors, shelves, toe-kick, crown molding, strip at bottom of upper cabinets to hide the under cabinet lighting. Stuff like that.

The counter has been placed on top of the cabinets, but has not been attached yet. That is my countertop guy's job and he will also install the sink, garbage disposer, and over range microwave. Not sure when that will happen but I think it will be before the end of the week.

Then I get to put all the items back into the cabinets. While doing this I will get rid of extra, useless (to me) stuff by giving away to someone who has nothing. I recycle my "stuff" because I hate to throw anything away. Everything I give away, I feel that I have gotten my use out of it. I do not ask for receipts and I do not claim on my income tax, because I don't feel that is the true spirit of giving. That is just for me

The reason I am blogging about this:
#1. This has been a very long process which began in March 2008.
#2. I tend to obsess about stuff.
#3. If I write about it this gets out of my head and I won't have to think about it so much.
#4. If I am thinking about it too much I can not get to sleep.

More later.

What happened?

This is black mold. My plan was to do a mini-update on my kitchen and put a new laminate countertop on. When the existing countertop was taken off, this is what we saw. It was a patch of black mold about 30" high and 24" wide. My little update turned into a complete rebuild and thank God I had insurance to cover the mold damage.

This is the OLD kitchen. I should have started this blog a long time ago. But I didn't....

I live in a small condo built in 1980 and I moved here about 4 years ago. I always hated the kitchen, so I started to do things to make it better.

First I tore out the plastic panels that covered the flourescent lights that were attached to the walls above the cabinets. I was here for 2 days when that happened. I marched that UGLY plastic out to the dumpster with great pride! Right now I can't find any pictures of the original kitchen which had fake walnut (dark) laminate cabinets, harvest gold and avocado vinyl flooring, and other 1980's decoration.

Then I had the cabinets painted. I took all the doors off the cabinets and that was a lot of undoing. After the cabinets were painted with an off white product called Cabinet Rescue from Lowe's, oh I forgot to say that the original cabinets were formica fake walnut awful, I had the lights taken off the walls and just laid them on top of the cabinets and had 4" baseboard, which was pretending to be crown molding, nailed to the top front edge of the cabinets. Also, new 18" porcelain tiles that look like stone, were laid in my kitchen and laundry room. Great improvement and I probably spent around $800 doing all this. Also had the kitchen and dining area painted orange sorbet, which is a terra cotta looking color, but I got tired of that after 4 years.

In March 2008 I decided to remove the peninsula that was dividing the area between the kitchen and dining area. See the pictures above. You can also see that ugly, I mean, UUGGGLLEEEE, backsplash. So I went online and did a search, "how to install cabinets" and then went backwards to remove this. I just started by unscrewing the countertop, then started removing all the screws I could find.

The area under the cabinets had to have 1/2 tiles removed and full tiles installed. ALWAYS KEEP TILES FROM A JOB in case you need them later. The laminate floor had to be altered to meet the tile.

I wanted to have new countertops put on top of the cabinets and a new backsplash. When my countertop guy pulled off the old countertop he/we discovered black mold. ICK ICK ICK, so that started a long process of insurance company, mold remedial specialists, and patience.

Tomorrow is June 30 and my new cabinets are to be installed. I will continue with this later. Stay tuned!