Kitchen cabinets

I have about a bazillion updates I need to blog about - so I'll get to one at a time.

Everything in these weeks is moving so fast.  It should actually mostly be done next week while we're out of town (going to Palm Beach for an exciting actuarial conference and some vacation time - Kyle will be studying).

First up, our cabinets were installed.  Unfortunately, it wasn't a drama-free install.  We had a bit of issues with the layout.

You can see the layout in this post.  The problem with the layout is that it includes 6" of space that our kitchen area didn't actually have.  Why did this happen?  We think it was a mis-interpretation by the cabinet lady of the floorplan we gave her.  Because the floorplan the architect drew is accurate.  Nevertheless, the space is what it is, and resulted in stress over my dream kitchen.

The cabinet guy was able to make the long wall of cabinets work by tweaking things here and there (and you would never know there was a problem).  So after he did that, we ended up with cabinets like this:

They look great, right?  I think so.  Except that there is an island missing.  And, because of the 6" error, the place where the plumbing was run through the floor is too close to the wall.  There would have been only about 30" of room (if that much) to walk between the pantry wall and the island.  (Picture the island right on top of the plumbing in the picture and it's too close to the corner on the right).  So we walked it out, measured it, debated it, and decided that the only option was to move the plumbing.  We still had some space to play with between the two islands (it was currently a little over 40" of space, but we really only need 36" for it to still be comfortable and functional).  With that space, we decided we needed to move that island closer to the other island and farther away from the pantry.  So we had to wait for the plumber to come in and move the lines before the islands could be finished.  And I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was installed. 

Here are the cabinets now:

A couple of things to note:  The cabinets are really dusty, sorry, so the pictures don't show quite how pretty they are.  And not all of the molding is installed at the top yet.  That'll be completed soon.

But I love them so far!