Day 283- Shimmy Shimmy Coco Puff

We have upper cabinets, as you know. So now it's time for base cabinets. Usually, Ikea recommends these funny little feet things;

For those wondering; yes, we do have that particular cabinet.



but Hubbs and I like to over build and over engineer everything. The people who get this house after us will be confused. Some stuff will be really overbuilt (what we build), some stuff will be built just fine (original to the house) and some stuff will be practically falling down (previous owners). That might sound harsh, but you haven't seen our deck. Suffice to say that at least 3 support posts are just hanging off the bottom of the deck. We don't let people out there.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, we chose to build a base instead of using the feetsies. This required many hours at HD buying the straightest wood (make your own joke there, people). And then we spent a ton of time measuring, and measuring again. Then Hubbs would go outside to cut and I would measure once more, just for good measure (HA! A pun!). Then we brought the bases into the kitchen and got our shimmy on. Our floor isn't 100% level, but those cabinets will be, so we used shims to bring the bases to level. And we used our handy dandy levels, all three of them, to check obsessively that they would be level.

Is the bubble in the middle?

Another really nice thing about building your own bases is that you can customize the height of the cabinets. Hubbs is pretty tall, so having taller cabinets is a huge plus. Not having to pay for custom taller cabinets is an even bigger plus!

See all the shims?

Since we finally picked out counter tops, we will have all the cabinets installed by this Friday so they can make a laser mock-up of what we need to get. That leaves us ready for tile this weekend. My, we are moving quickly now.

And on the menagerie front; Hubbs found this gigantic spider in his laptop bag. I've used a pen for scale.

Please don't eat me!

In my opinion, spiders shouldn't have eyes that reflect light. Creepy.  No worries, we put him outside to help control the skeeter population.

Day 281- Well, lookie there

It was a long week of assembling, gluing and in one case, disassembling. In total we purchased 9 cabinets and it took a full week to get them together. Some of the cool things about Ikea is that we were able to purchase lazy susans to fill the space. Now we have less dead space and more storage. We don't have any normal lower cabinets, actually. More on all that later. 

We did get the wall cabinets in and my are they pretty. Ikea also has this cool system where you hang a metal strip on the wall and then hang the cabs from that strip. Easy peasy, right? Well, yes, except our brand new drywalls aren't completely level so it required some tinkering.

Three down

As you can see in this picture there is at least one level in the room. If I'm being really honest, I will tell you that hanging the cabinets required three levels. A four foot, a rocket and laser level. That laser level was hanging out in the pantry on top of the sugar jar. It has a sweet tooth. You'll also note, because we are really cool, that we have the directions stapled to the wall. We were worried that we would miss a step. 

Wait, let me make sure they are level again

At this point, the Hubbs looked over at me (I was on the floor assembling yet another box) and asked what we were missing. To which I responded "base cabinets, paint, tile, trim, a sink....". But his point was, all the sudden our kitchen was starting to look like a functional kitchen again. And what I thought was the laser level blinding me was really the light at the end of the tunnel. That's right, I'm going to cook something in this house soon. BRING IT ON PAULA DEEN!! And I might get to do dishes in a sink! Not a bathtub, a real honest to goodness sink. 

There we are, three cabinets down, 6 more to go. But we didn't stop there, oh now. We hung to more. Thanks levels!! Those five cabinets are within 1/16 of an inch from each other. They are nothing if not precise. I say: the floor is sloping, but my cabinets are straight!

Uppers. Up. Ers

Oh, and I think that we will have a functioning kitchen in 2 weeks. Saaaaweet!