Cabinets installed!

This weekend was a cabinet installation extravaganza! We worked our asses off and we are nearly finished installing all of the cabinets.

We ran into a bit of a snag with the last hanging cabinet on the sink wall. This is a 15 inch wide cabinet and it turned out we were hanging it inside a 24 inch span between studs, ie: there was no stud behind this cabinet to attach it to. Anne came up with the idea of attaching a 2x4 to a bunch of studs adjacent above the cabinets and then attach the 15 incher to the stud. This worked out beautifully. You can see a bit of the 2x4 up above in the photo below, however this should be hidden when we install the crown molding.

All of the uppers installed for this wall.

The worst thing had to be installing the sink cabinet. I didn't want to cut huge holes in the back of the cabinet to accommodate the plumbing as it was so instead I turned off the water and used my torch to remove the bulkier pieces of piping. I then measured and drilled smaller holes in the cabinet and with a bit of finagling, kicking, swearing and pulling on pipes we got it into position with the pipes coming through the holes I had made for them. That wasn't so bad. The thing that really sucked was reattaching the copper pipes and soldering them together. Seriously, working with solder sucks. I was honestly amazed that when we turned the water back on there were no leaks.

The sink wall, completed!

After finishing with the sink wall we moved on to the fridge wall, of which ther was a tall pantry cabinet, two uppers and one lower surrounding a space for the fridge. This wasn't too difficult other than attaching a three-inch strip to the pantry cabinet and sawing a bit off the window frame to accommodate it. We did run into one snag towards the end of our labor. A misery having to do with the fact that none of our walls are plumb. The left-most upper cabinet sticks slightly over the edge of the wall near the top, by about a quarter inch, at the bottom it lines up just fine. We're going to overcome this with a strip of wood eventually, but it was annoying to discover, who built this house?

The fridge wall!

The lower cabinet next to the fridge is just sitting there and we need to screw it into place yet. However, before we do that we need to deal with the HVAC vent that exists on the floor behind it. We've decided to move the air under the cabinet and vent it out at the kick board so we'll have to modify the cabinet a bit to accomplish this. It'll be my first foray into HVAC work, so that will be exciting. We decided to wait until tonight to finish this up since by the end of the day on Sunday my arms were seriously hurting when I was holding the drill up to put those last screws in. We also have to install the backer board for the tile we're going to put up for the backsplash.

On Tuesday the guy is coming out to measure the cabinets for our counter tops and then it will be a few weeks before they get installed (by someone who isn't me, thank God).

Update: HVAC work sucks, or at least the cutting of metal venting sucks. All of the cabinets are installed and the guy measured for the counter tops this morning.