Day One of the Kitchen Install

Soon, I will get back to posting about other things, like poetry or the fun I'm having watching the birds in the yard.  But the kitchen install is ever present in my mind.  So let me post some updates, with pictures.

Here's the way the kitchen looked just over a year ago, when we first bought the house:

In some ways, it would have been fun to work with what was there--it's got a vintage appeal.  But the oven part of the stove didn't work.  There aren't enough cabinets and some of the ones that were there weren't very functional:  the corner cabinets were deep and impossible to access most of them.  My spouse hated the scalloped trim at the top.

So, instead of keeping it, we went in a different direction, but in many ways, it's a direction we've covered before.  Whenever I've chosen cabinet colors, I always come back to a cinnamon color.  It seems relatively timeless.  We thought about gray, because the house is dark, and we thought that a lighter cabinet color might make the space feel brighter.  But in the end, we came back to the spiced maple kind of color (this cabinet maker calls it cherry) that I love.

I never had any question that we would pay for installers to put the cabinets in place.  Even in my younger years, when I was much stronger, holding a cabinet in place while someone else screwed it to a wall stud was not something I could do for more than one cabinet.  We are both older and less limber now, and I'm glad that the cost of the installation wasn't more than my spouse could consider.  

Yesterday I expected a team of installers, but only one man showed up.  He was more than capable.  He could install an upper cabinet all by himself.  I thought he would make much less progress than he did, so I'm pleased with what happened yesterday.

I sat at my computer for much of the day, which was fine.  I got all the reading done for weeks 1 and 2 of my seminary class which starts tonight.  I got most of an essay done; it's due to the magazine editor today.

Here is how the kitchen looked at the end of the day yesterday:

It still needs lower cabinets, along with appliances installed.  But still, an amazing amount of progress made by one man doing it all himself.