Cabinets, Appliances and Dinner!

A few things to update on and hopefully you'll notice real progress happening in the kitchen.

The cabinet install is mostly done. We ran into an issue with the fridge panel height as our floors are not completely level due to the age of our house. Therefore, we'd need to heavily shim our fridge panels...since this wouldn't look right, we've had to return and then order taller fridge panels and cut them to size. As a result we didn't install the deep cabinet that goes above the fridge and the fridge panels. Everything else is in place and this place is actually starting to look like a kitchen!

Kitchen Cabinet Install In Progress

And yes...our dishwasher works..

Microwave installed, stove hook up and fridge plugged in. Life is good!

Additionally, last week our appliances came in. We ordered them online, which may be particularly scary for some people. However we did an exhaustive amount of research online and checked out all of the appliances in the store before ordering online.  We pretty much had our appliances decided upon in January and been patiently waiting for the point in the project where they finally came.  We ordered through appliancesconnection.com, who are out of Brookyln, NY.  We estimated we saved over $2000 from ordering through Home Depot or Lowes and about $2700 from full retail price. We totally nerded out on the appliances opting for the dual fuel GE cafe range, a matching convection microwave, and a samsung counter depth refrigerator. The range is my absolute favorite, an absolutely sexy showpiece of the kitchen!

We really couldn't wait to hook up the appliances and hooking up the range was quite an adventure! First we had to change out the 4-prong new style power cord to an older 3-prong power cord so it would fit into the wall receptacle. The gas hookup was pretty straightforward and only required two trips to Home Depot to get the correct part. Tonight we decided it was necessary to make sure both the gas stove and oven worked. On the menu tonight was: Chicken al Pimentos (chicken in a hot pepper, chicken stock, lemon, white wine sauce), brussel sprouts with bacon and scallops and tomato and basil risotto.  

Perfectly normal to be cooking dinner with drill next to you....

Bacon, brussel sprouts, scallops...mmmm good!

 

The granite people are coming on Thursday to template. We can't wait for that. Our sheetrock countertops just aren't cutting it!. 

Cabinets

Our main motivation for starting the kitchen crazily in the winter time was the attractive pricing/sales on cabinets during the winter months. We estimated that we saved $3500 by ordering our cabinets during this special promotional period. Additionally, we plan to install the cabinets ourselves which saves an additional $1800.  In the northeast you have to be somewhat crazy to live without a kitchen in the winter time.  Luckily, this winter was an extremely mild winter which helped. As said previously we got our cabinets for Lowe's. We got semi-custom cabinetry which offers a surprisingly awesome number of options and crazy drawer accessories. Some of the neat cabinets to mention are a message center with whiteboard and key hangers (upper left hand corner of photo), super lazy susan on the bottom, 30" pull out drawers near the sink, and trash/recycling center.  The drawers are full pullouts and all drawers and cabinets have soft-close.  Our base super lazy susan is actually to big to fit through the sliding door. We're going to have to remove the doors to get that thing in.

Taking the cabinets out of the boxes was also pretty entertaining. They are all well wrapped and protected for shipping. I'm sure it will take months dispose of all of this in the recycling bin. Right now we lined the floor with the cardboard boxes to protect the new hardwood floors. 

We have endless amount of cardboard corners and cardboard boxes at the house.

We chose shaker style cabinets in a slightly off white color called coconut. We're excited to see what they look like once they are all installed and outfitted with the cabinet hardware.

Kitchen with cabinet bases

We got our hardware off overstock.com.

The drawer pulls will look like this:

Photo from overstock.com

 And the knobs will look like this:

Photo from overstock.com

We're HOPING that our large sink fits in the sink base. It's difficult to find a large sink to fit in a 30" sink base cabinet. They seem to be 24" or just about 30". This is what it should look like:

Photo from faucetdirect.com