Monday, April 6, 2009

Cabinets, Tile

Jonathan and the crew from Woodmaster delivered the cabinet boxes today and started installing the kitchen! The boxes are built from "Appleply", all the exterior doors and panels will be Wenge veneer.



Jonathan and Ryan installing the sink base run. They are fussing it all in very carefully so as to make all the countertop details work out. We are running the concrete counter right into the window area to create an extra-wide countertop and a "seamless" look. The ribbon windows will be our "backsplash" along that side and just around the corner.



End of the day:



Here is one of the Wenge end panels. Some are pre-installed where it makes sense, others will be added later. Very nice!



I've not dealt with custom cabinets before - these are definitely not the standard boxes from Home Depot. The toe kicks go in separately, then the boxes land on top and can be cut and adjusted to make everything align perfectly. Some boxes are just one "bank", others are set up to take 3 banks of drawers, etc. Finish panels and doors/drawers are installed after that. Now that I've seen the design and installation flexibility that full custom cabinets gets you, I doubt I'll ever be able to go back to standard "boxes".

Speaking of custom, we are also going with custom-fabricated Stainless Steel sinks in the kitchen. Yes, ok, custom sinks sounds kind of absurd, but...I dare you to try to find a shallow, single bowl, stainless kitchen sink with left-hand drain. Apparently they just don't exist.

Too Much Information Warning: Here's the reasoning behind the left-hand drain. We want to be able to fit trash and recycling, plus a garbage disposer, under the sink, so if you have a center drain, there's not really enough room left on either side for a proper barrel. We are also both rigth handed, which means we really want the trash barrel on the right-hand side when you open the cabinet. So, yes, we've thought about all this a bit too much...

Back to sinks: 95% of stainless sinks are dual-bowl affairs (Cathy was adamant about a single bowl rather than 2 semi-useful smaller ones). And when you do actually find a single bowl sink, it has a right hand drain and isn't reversible, and is probably 9" or 10" deep. Since our countertops will be a full 2" thick, a 9" sink would make for an "11 inch-deep backbreaker" when doing dishes (we are both tall). I think we found 1, maybe 2, sinks (out of 37,851 we looked at) that were even close to what we wanted (e.g. modern, simple design).

The thing that pushed us over the edge was actually the small bar sink that's going next to the espresso machine. Even if we picked 1 of the 2 possible choices for main sink, the bar sink wouldn't have matched.

So, yet another custom job:



The surprise was that it really wasn't all that expensive - I think the cost probably came out to be nearly identical to what we would have spent on "standard stuff" - so that was a good call. We got exactly what we wanted for basically even money.

Other trades were here today as well. We had the finish carpenter on site, as well as the tile guy. The tile guy set the laundry room floor today - I suspect that he'll be back to do the master bath this week as well.

Laundry room floor:



The floor guys are nearly done as well. I'd guess they have 1 day left upstairs and that will be it.

Master Bedroom:






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