The Kitchen: Part II

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving saw much progress on our kitchen.  My father arrived at around 6:30 PM and we resumed destruction immediately.  Every cabinet was ripped unceremoniously from their resting place, the old wall above the cabinets was removed (which made it rain insulation), and I re-tiled the floor in some key areas that the new cabinets were not going to cover.  The other spots in the floor were left bare because my father swore he'd be able to shim the cabinets later. 

Other than accumulating the bulk of the garbage from the kitchen project on the whole the work of Wednesday night was efficient and uneventful.

Thanksgiving morning I awoke at 6:30 AM to my father knocking at my bedroom door whilst singing a song about how much he loved Dunkin' Donuts (the melody of which I have thankfully blocked out) because the coffee gives him the energy he needs to work all day long.  That song unbelievably continued until the wife returned with D&D 20 minutes later.

In the meantime my father and I did some electrical mapping and had a serious discussion about whether or not what we had planned could burn down the house.  At the end of the debate we decided that we'd need to call in my Uncle Don (the familial electricity guru) for the heavy electrical hitting.  We did some cleaning, moved some wires around, and then left for Thanksgiving dinner (conveniently enough at Uncle Don's).  

Driving on Thanksgiving day was miserable as expected and after a 2 1/2 hour car ride in which we traversed every major highway in the state of NJ we sat down for our meal.  Dad badgered Uncle Don about coming back with us that night but he was not having any of that.  After some wheeling and dealing the old man got my uncle to agree to leave for South Jersey first thing the next morning.  

Once we got guaranteed participation from one uncle we went across town to interrupt my other uncle in the middle of his Thanksgiving dessert course.  Dad didn't give Uncle Bill any options, he explained that we were leaving in 10 minutes and Uncle Bill needed to be in the car.  Amazingly, Uncle Bill was excited about work on the kitchen and agreed to come down.  45 minutes later (Uncle Bill moves at his own pace) we were all back in the car and headed to South Jersey.

We managed to find enough to work to do on the kitchen until about midnight and went to bed exhausted.  Once 6:30 AM rolled around I heard a familiar knocking on the door but this time there was no song to accompany it.  After a brief inquiry my father informed me that he had been up all night trying to solve a kitchen problem I had not even realized existed.  It turned out that the cabinet I had bought to place over my fridge was about 2 inches too long and would have to be returned.

Unfortunately because we went with stock cabinets, there was no alternately smaller cabinet we could buy in it's place.  Most cabinets come in 3 inch increments but Lowes does not stock them in all possible sizes (must not be cost effective).  A brief Google search proved fruitless so we decided we'd deal with the over-sized cabinet problem when it inevitably came back up.