Kitchen Nightmares: Somerville Edition

As of early this afternoon, there are no more open walls.  While the cabinets were being piled up in the dining room and hallway, drywall guys were at work in the kitchen covering the walls in dark-grey sheet rock.  So now we’ve gone from finished white walls to no walls and dark wood to dark grey unfinished walls.

Note the white splotches in the picture below.  They only appeared when I took a picture with the flash.  I think there were lots of fine reflective dust particles in the air.  We couldn’t see them, but they really had a dramatic effect on the photos.  Makes me wonder how much of that we breathed in.  Note to self: save photos for future class-action lung-disease lawsuit.

New drywall. Also, apparently, it's snowing.

I think Ruskin likes the simplicity of the gray monotone.

Tomorrow the walls get a few coats of plaster and will be back to white and ready for paint after Christmas.

Also, here’s Anne reheating pizza in what space is left in the dining room:

Cramped quarters

And peeking over the stacked-up cabinets:

Can't get there from here

Uncategorized construction, drywall

Score one for Kitchen Interiors and Plain & Fancy.  The delivery truck arrived over an hour early today and within about a half hour all of our new cabinets had been unloaded into our cleared-out dining room and hallway.

At about 10:15am, a giant semi pulled up our street with a Kitchen Interiors van just ahead of it.  This truck looked absolutely HUGE on our little city street.  In fact, with the snow and lack of parking in front of the house, it completely blocked traffic up our street for the length of the delivery.  A Somerville public works truck was among the several frustrated motorists who couldn’t make it past.  We apologize to them for the inconvenience, but to be fair, there was a way around using other side streets.

Enormous delivery truck

At one point a police car came by with its sirens on and I thought we were in trouble.  I had flashbacks to January 2005, when we moved to this place just after two huge snowstorms.  Our moving truck blocked Anne’s street in Cambridge, and several times it had to circle the block in the middle of loading just to let other cars or Cambridge police officers pass.

Blocking the entire street

Now the dining room is literally packed wall to wall with cabinets.  The two tallest cabinets, the pantry and oven units, are blocking the front hallway.  We can’t get to the basement or downstairs bathroom at all, at least until the plastic separating the dining room from the kitchen is removed and we can come around from the other side.

Dining room not so empty any more

None shall pass

A very tall pantry

The good news is that the delivery happened on time and the cabinets look amazing.  The bad news is that because we’re a couple of days behind and this is Christmas week, they won’t start to go up until this weekend at the earliest.  Most of the work won’t happen until next week.  Not a huge deal, but it does mean that they’ll be taking up lots of space for longer.

Uncategorized cabinets

Just as we were getting used to living in two rooms downstairs - the living room and dining room - we had to clear everything out of the dining room to make way for the cabinets, which will be delivered today.  To the basement went the table, chairs, bookshelf, and the kitchen blinds which had been safely stored in there since they were taken down the first day.  Now I’m hitting my head on the chandelier every time I walk through the room.

Empty dining room

Of course, all of this was necessary for the project to move forward, but losing the use of another room is actually pretty inconvenient.  We’d been using the table like we would have used the kitchen counter before - for drying dishes, holding pizza boxes and take-out containers while we ate, and so on.

Still, I’m not complaining.  It’s exciting that the cabinets will be here today.  We’re looking forward to seeing what we bought so many months ago, even if they’re all disassembled and in boxes.

Today the drywall goes up, and tomorrow it gets plastered.  Pictures when the work is done…

Uncategorized cabinets, commentary