Posted On Thursday, April 27th, 2006 By David Veatch
We got the counters in. They don’t fit. We’ve been without a fully functional kitchen since mid-February. This is well into sucking now. We’re frustrated, burnt out on home improvement projects, and sick of coming home to a house half in disrepair. I’m expecting a call now for someone to come out and template the installed cabinets, which *should* have been done to begin with. It wasn’t, and they don’t fit. Two more weeks without a kitchen. Two more weeks with the appliances in the dining room, and the dining room in the living room. Bah.
Posted On Thursday, April 27th, 2006 By David Veatch
Well… they started the installation yesterday, but didn’t quite finish, in spite of giving it a valiant effort and staying until 6:00pm. We were short on hardware (drawer pulls and knobs) by 4. No big deal. They were overlooked in the order to begin with (though we’d picked them out by hand with the designer) so it was merely a matter of picking four more up. The hinges that the manufacturer packed with the cabinets came in two styles. I’m not sure why there were two styles, only that there were two styles. That would be fine, except that one of the styles didn’t work. Those doors installed with the non-worky style didn’t shut without grinding against each other. Since there were no extras of the worky style, there was nothing further to do. There’s two pieces of finished molding yet to put down. One next to the refrigerator and one next to the dishwasher. The countertop… well, it’s supposed to be here tomorrow, but there’s good reason to believe it won’t fit. We were told that we could go ahead and order it on the measurements already taken and the design layout. Thing is, anyone who’s been through this more »
Posted On Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 By David Veatch
I’ve been wanting to commute to work on my bicycle for some time now. It’s only about 10 miles, but it’s through some potentially nasty traffic. If I’m going to do this, I need to spend some time Saturday driving the roads between to find a decent route that will minimize my interaction with the rest of the traffic. I’m comfortable riding in traffic, but rush hour is a different kind of beast. Aside from my own close call experiences in Lawrence, the countless close call stories from others, and the general common sense aspect, I witnessed this morning another example of why one should fear riding around moving cars. I’m heading south on Metcalf I come to College. There’s a bike commuter heading west to east on the south side of the intersection. He *almost* makes it all the way when some asshat heading north in a Sebring-type vehicle just pulls right out in front of him to make a right turn on College. Biker endo’s over the hood. Fortunately, he gets up apparently unhurt and picks up his bike to wheel it to the sidewalk. The driver, to his credit, gets out. While it’s impossible to tell what more »
Posted On Monday, April 24th, 2006 By David Veatch
The kitchen crew is in right now installing the kitchen cabinets. We’ve been without cabinets for two to four weeks now, depending on if you count from the first demo day or the last. It’s been… unpleasant. But today, that all changes. While we won’t have the countertops for a couple of days, at least we’ll have cabinets! The countertops will arrive on Wednesday, when we’ll pick them up and install them all ourselves. It’s been an interesting couple of days. Yesterday we did the final demo on the sink side base cabinets. That meant yanking out the dishwasher as well. The water shut off valves beneath the sink were so old that the hot water valve simply did not work. Having previously been unsuccessful in finding the water shut-off valve for the house, and not knowing where or how to shut it off at the street (yes… home owners 101 level here), we called a plumber. That worked out b/c we got a few issues straightened out that have been on the back burner for a few months now, at a price that really wasn’t too bad. That done, I finished the demo on the base cabinets. Right now, more »