Update September 11

I had work in the morning, so I left it up to Rich to finish the house. Even though he's Superman, he was not faster than a speeding bullet when he got to working on it. Alas, the house is not finished. Sigh.

There is a whole dimension of work on the house I will not/cannot do. Anything that involves getting on the roof, getting in the crawlspace, and using the table saw or circular saw is off limits. I'm the type of person that, in my overcautious state, will actually cut a finger off or give myself a concussion, or simply stand still and fall off the roof somehow. These elements are all Rich. Therefore, all I could do a chunk of yesterday was sit and wait for safely-on-the-ground instructions for his assistant.

He got the hole cut in the ceiling of the kitchen for the vented microwave. Then he crawled in the attic and Chuck Norris'd the ducting into position to meet with the roof. Then he got on the roof and punched a hole in the roof with his bare hands . . . well, actually he made the hole for the vent with a reciprocating saw and raw man-strength. I held the ladder, passed his tools to him, and cleaned up.

Once he got a lot of the cutting and positioning of the ductwork in place and done, I was able to help cut the cabinets (jigsaw, no problem), and get the other cabinets in place.

We also discovered in a dry run that the pantry cabinets ARE in fact, a tight fit in the kitchen, since they run floor to ceiling, so we realized we didn't need half inch plywood to mount any of the cabinets on in that side of the kitchen. That means that the sink side cabinets will be 3/4" higher than the other cabinets. But all of the bed moulding (mini crown) that we'll put up at the top of the cabinets will all have close to the same amount of reveal to the cabinet doors. The place that will look different is the space from the flooring to the top of the toe kick. It will take a very astute, annoying person to notice the difference, we hope, but a compromise needed to be made somewhere to accommodate the old house dimensions and inconsistencies. One remarkable thing while we installed base cabinets on the living room wall side of the kitchen: the floor was LEVEL!! Absolutely amazing.

So we got most of the base cabinets in on the LR wall side, one of the uppers, and have to wait on the other upper because we have to get the pantry in first, to line them up correctly. The pantry cabinet actually has a flub on it from manufacturing, so we'll have to do some planing today to get the edges more in line with everything else. Then we can finish installing almost everything.

Today is a weird list of what we need to do: a lot involves making more shelves and pullouts so I can (finally) unpack into the kitchen. We also need plywood counters so I can install things in the base cabinets of the kitchen. This all will entail finding my adjustable cabinet hole jig I made in 2005 when rehabbing the Compton house. Rich says it came with us, but only God knows where it might be. We might also have to go to Lowe's to find a tool that will allow us to drill holes in the sides of things in quarters too close for a typical drill. Can't have a weekend without going to Lowe's.

Our next big dilemma is when do we put flooring in the kitchen. If we start installing appliances now, then they'll have to be uninstalled and reinstalled when we put flooring in, since all of them except the microwave will entail sitting on the floor. I don't know at the moment if getting a completed kitchen installed is more important than a working kitchen yet. And if a working kitchen is all that's important, what do we use as flooring until then, since we're walking around on tar paper right now, which is not ideal. Hmm . . . let the noodling begin.