Update July 1

Sorry, folks . . . didn't get to a computer at a decent hour last night. This one will be relatively boring . . .

Went to my closing, then headed straight to the house. Rich and I only had 4 cabinets left after our marathon assembly the day before. I finally counted . . . we had ordered 21 cabinets; some with incredibly time-consuming items like separate drawers, pot drawers, self-close slides, etc. which take a LOT of time to assemble, line up, etc. Since there were literally NO instructions (except for a random single sheet instruction page with phrases like "assemble cabinets, tighten locking, do a jig on the cardboard box it came in" there wasn't much help on this). After we had assembled the first 12" drawer bank, and had to stop out of frustration before we mangled it trying to force it to work, we managed to avoid almost all the other cabinets with drawers until now. So I had to sit down and figure out the "magic" to getting them together.

Turns out, the "magic" involves a ball pin hammer.

We left the final four cabinets--the most aggravating, or large: the base of the pantry (36" wide, by about 4 feet high, by 24" deep), the lazy susan (with all sorts of interesting parts . . . I wonder where THAT goes?), the 3 drawer pot drawer bank, and the two drawer 36" base with two roll-out drawers. All the drawers are solid, dove-tail construction, so with some coaxing, most came together like champs. The hardware, however, is another matter.

It doesn't help that it initially appears that there's nothing that holds the hardware to the drawer itself or the cabinet except some praying and inventive spell-casting. It seems that only about 6 screws per drawer hold the entire thing together, which to my untrained, non-physics-taking eye seems a bit thin. We'll have to test and beef up if necessary after using for a while. The hardware "slides" into a hole on the end of the cabinet, with a claw-like appendage that must be hammered into the hole. Once that's accomplished (not as easy as it sounds), then the slide must then be slid open, to reveal a small pin that fits into another hole in the drawer. It must also be hammered into the hole and then quickly secured with screws before the whole thing disengages from the drawer. Magic.

For those four aggravating cabinets, it took about 5 hours on my own. The previous day I had assembled 5 cabinets on my own in about 2 hours, just to give you a reference.

Finally went home, showered (the 2nd time), went to the family picnic at Rich's work for a bit and then headed back to the house to assess what kind of breakers we had in the panel (for the shopping trip today) and to take pictures of damaged pieces of the cabinets.

A nice surprise--got to hang out with B&L also, and got to show them the progress and cast the vision for them. It was awesome to watch the gleam in B's eye when he heard all the projects and I knew he couldn't help himself: "Are you SURE you don't want to try to sell after you do all this?" I totally know what he means--but this time, we love the house payment, the area, the location, and we want to know what it's like to live with our own renovations. Unless someone wants to offer us enough money to go buy exactly what we want, where we want, elsewhere, I think we're staying put!

Today's the big shopping day. Rich took off for the projects and the weather (to get in the attic to do electrical work while it's NOT 95 degrees). Got a benefit from Lowe's as a Realtor, so bought a gift card at a discount for ourselves, and combined with our "welcome to the neighborhood" coupon they sent us, we should get a 15% discount on materials during our trip today. The last time we did this a few years ago, it took us about 4 hours or so. I need to remember to wear sturdy shoes. :o)

Once sleeping beauty gets up, we'll head out!