My blog was down for a while, but I finally have it back up and running. Which means I have a number of updates to make… the most notable of which is that our kitchen is complete. (Bear in mind that the substantial delays in me posting means that this all occurred nearly a year ago)
We ordered finished – but unassembled – cabinets from US Cabinet Depot and lucked into a connection. It turns out our neighbor runs a kitchen cabinet business and was able to order our pieces basically at cost. We had just gotten a quote elsewhere, and he got us our cabinets for almost $5,000 less… which we promptly turned around and spent on our countertops.
Assembling and mounting the cabinets was one of the quicker and more enjoyable tasks. I always hear kitchen remodel horror stories, and had expectations for it to be horrible; I suppose the average person remodelling their kitchen hasn’t also tiled 1100 square feet, installed a standing seam metal roof, built retaining walls, framed an entire house, etc, so my reference point is a bit skewed. Needless to say, we assembled and installed our cabinets, and built our island in about a week of actual work.*
* It’s important to note that with slowdowns due to Covid and needing to reorder a few pieces for the sake of color matching, that “week of work” was spread over the course of multiple months.
The most challenging part was building a system to make the back of our sink accessible, even though it’s in the middle of the island. John built an ingenious system where the decorative panels are attached using magnets, providing access to the pipes and wires in the back.
From there, it was time to pick out our counters. We had originally planned to go with a white quartz slab (and had made most of our color choices with that in mind). However, we fell in love with a piece of gray quartzite and felt the gradient would make our somewhat-sterile-looking house a little more interesting.
Our island slab was about as big as it could be (in fact, only about a quarter of the quartzite and granite pieces came in big enough pieces), so the installers were naturally thrilled to find that our kitchen is up a flight of stairs. Despite previewing the house, they only sent a team of 2 guys to do the work. As soon as they arrived and saw the stairs, they called another team in for support. Eventually, they decided to back the truck up the driveway and prop the ramp at the top of the hill, giving them direct access to the second floor. Not that it was easy… we overheard conversations about which direction they would all run if it started falling over, and there was definitely a point in the middle where it looked like the slab almost tipped over.
But in the end, we got the countertop installed without any problems, including the wall counters in the kitchen, all three bathrooms, and the installation of all four sinks. And in my completely unbiased opinion, it looks phenomenal!
Your kitchen is stunning, absolutely amazing!