Kitchen Nightmares: Somerville Edition

A couple of days ago, Yale called to let us know that our appliances would be delivered today between noon and 3pm.  This was easily doable since I planned to be home all day anyway.  Then, at about 7am, while Anne and I were still fast asleep, the doorbell rang.  They showed up eight hours early!

The dining room was promptly filled with a refrigerator and several enormous boxes.  The Wolf cooktop, complete with wooden pallet, plus the double oven, dishwasher, blower fan, and hood insert occupied almost as much space as the cabinets had before, essentially keeping us from using the room we had just gotten back when the cabinets moved into place.  Thankfully, it was only for one day this time.  By tonight most of them had moved into the kitchen.

Wolf cooktop, packaged and on a shipping pallet

Double oven in a box

Refrigerator in place in the kitchen

George and his helper George (very confusing) arrived shortly afterward to continue hanging and assembling cabinets.  Most of the upper cabinets are now on the walls, and the fridge space has started to take shape.  We’re now getting a sense of how much space we’ll have in the room now that we’re using both walls.  It’s a lot smaller than it used to be.  Not necessarily in a bad way, but it will take some getting used to.

More upper cabinets alongside fridge enclosure

Vent fan hood with more wall cabinets

One thing we realized is that the fridge and the cabinet above it will make it so that the window isn’t visible from most of the room.  Both are, I think, 24 inches deep and are placed directly to the right of the window, effectively shading the front of the room from any window light.  This will definitely take some getting used to, even with the window in the back door providing natural light to the whole room.

Can't see the window. There will be another cabinet above the fridge as well.

Tonight’s dinner was at Stone Hearth Pizza in Belmont.  Their food is excellent and all locally sourced.  We don’t get there often enough because Belmont Center is a little out of the way for us, and unfortunately they don’t deliver.  We were on our way back from Expo Design Center (fancy Home Depot) in Burlington, where we finally picked up cabinet hardware - simple brushed nickel knobs and drawer pulls that still ran us over three hundred bucks.  Nothing comes cheaply on this project.

Next up, we need to pick out a faucet and a pendant lamp for above the sink.  Both of those are quickly becoming tile-esque chores.

We took a trip down to Yale this afternoon to look at lighting.  It turns out that we should have done this a long time ago.  Some pendants rely on a transformer in the ceiling, which requires a larger electrical box than is standard.  We could have had a larger box installed, but that becomes much harder now that the walls are closed up.  It’s a minor issue that can certainly be worked out, but still, we’d hoped to avoid any more surprises.

Uncategorized cabinets, construction, issues, lighting, oven, refrigerator, stove

Happy New Year!

The kitchen is really starting to take shape.  We got back from our night in Stowe and found that the wall cabinets in the sink corner had been hung, and almost all the other cabinets are sitting in place (or close to it) in the kitchen.

It looks like George decided to start building from the sink corner, which has a big cabinet piece where the sink will go diagonally.  To the right is a regular cabinet and drawer, and to the left is a small vertical cabinet for storing cutting boards, pizza stones, etc. - flat things that can be stored vertically.  That cabinet provides some standing space between the sink and the dishwasher, which will be just to the left of it.

Above all of that, wall cabinets extend as far as tolerable toward the corner, and a set of shallower shelves take over and extend all the way into the corner itself.  The pendant lamp will hang down in front of the shelves directly above the sink.  We just have to figure out how far down the lamp should hang; we envisioned the shelves as being primarily decorative, so it’ll be ok that the light ends up directly in front of them.  We’ll just work it into whatever we decide to put there.

Wall cabinets and corner sink unit

The large pantry cabinet which was blocking our hallway is also in place in the corner next to the door.  It has three large drawers on the bottom and plenty of space for food on the top.

Pantry cabinet between door and window

Everything’s being built to a 96-inch design height, so the pantry and oven cabinets are each 8 feet tall.  All of the wall cabinets go up to 8 feet off the floor as well.  That should give us a ridiculous amount of storage, which we will proceed to fill within a couple of months.

With crown molding, the upper cabinets will touch the lower ceiling

Other pieces have been moved into place and unwrapped:

The full cooktop/vent hood assembly

Window (cat) seat with cat food and dish drawers

More cabinet work is scheduled to be done tomorrow.  All of our appliances should arrive tomorrow afternoon as well.  They get to live in the dining room while cabinet installation is finished.

This weekend we plan to get our cabinet hardware, faucet, and maybe the pendant lamp.  These are the last visual/functional elements we haven’t decided on and it’s getting to be that time.  Whee!

Uncategorized cabinets, construction, design

As of today, we’re a full 30 days into this project and lots of necessary behind-the-scenes work has been done.  The problem is that electrical and plumbing work is only exciting to me and maybe two other people in the world… so the fact that cabinets are starting to be moved into the kitchen is pretty cool.

Nothing is officially installed yet, but we got most of our dining room back:

Hooray for usable space!

A lot of what was there is now roughly laid out in the kitchen:

Several components for the main wall and sink area

Still-wrapped cabinet pieces along outside wall

We’re getting our first real look at the cherry finish.  These pictures really don’t do it justice.

Open shelves for under the cooktop

It’s hard to resist pulling the paper wrapping off all of them just to see what they all look like in the room, but there’s lots of work left to do and we’d rather make sure they avoid damage.  We just had to take a peek at these shelves.

We also discovered that the drawers and cabinet doors have hinges that close very slowly and smoothly.  You can’t slam them; when they’re almost closed, they slow down and move very gently the rest of the way.  For some reason I love this detail.

The cats have spent a lot of time inspecting and playing in the new cabinets.  We think Clyde likes them.

"This one's nice and roomy"

Too cute not to post

Ruskin’s pretty skeptical as usual.

"Why's there no food in this cabinet?"

Tonight we had a nice dinner with Mo & Mike at the Navy Yard Bistro in Charlestown.  Really good food if you know where to find it.  The place is tucked away on a side street in the old Navy Yard.  Their prices are reasonable too.  I had tasty pork dumplings and a large short rib with cheddar polenta.  Mmmmm…

More photos to come as the kitchen project moves into its second year!

Uncategorized cabinets, cats

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