makin' moves.

I know it probably looks pretty incremental, but I got a fair amount of stuff accomplished today. Now that the concrete is patched (sorry I didn't snap a better pic), I was able to install three more cabs. The first two were easy, but that tall one was a pain. As you can see, I installed a mounting rail up top, because the super tall skinny ones aren't very stable otherwise. Luckily singer Kim is here so I had her to help mount the rail and lift the big cab into position. Those big ones are a pain because they're really heavy (around 95 lbs) and when you stand them up, you can't lean them on the plastic legs or they'll break (thanks Ikea...). You can get away with leaning a tiny bit, but it's a delicate process, and pretty much impossible with one person unless you're Hulk Hogan. There's also a fair amount of tweezing the leg heights and checking eveness with a four-foot level, then clampling and screwing adjacent cabs together. I'm guessing the average cabinet installer-type human doesn't obsess about it nearly as much as I do, so I probably have the world's most even cabinets. As previously mentioned, counter installation guy is gonna love me.

Next step is to call someone with a very large dolly to (cue music of triumph...) move my giant-ass refrigerator in from the garage and plop that sucka down next to the cab. Not sure how I'll accomplish this, but now that I've seen a seven-foot piano roll sideways through my front door, I'm pretty confident that the fridge is do-able. I have one more identical narrow 88"-high cab for the right side of the fridge that I haven't yet built. I can build it whenever, but I'll probably wait 'til the fridge is in its spot before I install it.

Since there was no longer a huge cabinet in the dining area, I searched my garage for all the pieces of my Ikea faux Eero Saarinen tulip table. This was harder than it sounds, but I finally found everything (one piece was hiding out in a bedroom, oops), cleaned it all up and assembled it. The chairs look ok in the pic, but they've taken a beating and sooner or later I'm gonna get some matching tulip-style chairs.

Moving right along, above is the Ikea cab that will be most of the island and contain the sink. Unforunately, one lone Ikea cabinet that isn't screwed to a bunch of others is a somewhat wobbly affair, and the plastic legs aren't particularly confidence inspiring, so I decided to fortify it. First, I ordered six metal legs from Ikea. That may be overkill for a 36"-wide cab, but I figure the counter and sink will be heavy, and there's a good chance that someone will sit on this beast sooner or later and I'd rather not have it collapse. Secondly, I bought a bunch of 2x2 from Lowe's and I'm screwing and gluing the corners. The whole mess will be attached to 2x4 framing in back and on the sides, so this may be overkill, but it's pretty easy, so I may as well play it safe.

And another project... told you I did a lot today. This morning I removed the extra light switch in the family mentioned in my post two days back. This was slightly more work than expected because there were extra wires in the existing box. Basically I cut a big hole in the wall, pulled the box and replaced it with a shallower sealed plastic one that's completely inside the wall. Since the switch controlled a nearby outlet, I simply jumped the wires together creating a "standard" always-live outlet. Then I screwed some pieces of 1x2 behind the drywall, cut out a piece of drywall to fill the hole, screwed it to the 1x2's and mesh-taped and drywall mudded the whole mess. This is actually the second layer of drywall mud, and though it looks like a hot mess, it's actually very smooth and probably ready to paint after a quick sanding. With this done, I'm ready to paint the family room and I can't say how I glad I am to see that hideous brown go (though it lives on in ALL the bedrooms!). I tried to talk Kim into doing it, but she said no f-'in way.