With the plumbing finally cleared up and the sink, disposal, and dishwasher connected and working, we felt like we could finally finish up all the cabinet work on that side of the kitchen. In contrast with things like plumbing and electrical where we had to deal with my 1940 house's weird quirks, the cabinets just went together as advertised, with no unpleasant surprises. We assembled the drawers (and the lazy susan for the corner cabinet), added the side pieces, made templates and put on the cabinet handles, and mounted the doors. Here's how the cabinets look (check out that double-hinged door on the corner cabinet; I love that thing) along with the working sink (check the pushbutton for the disposal) and the new fridge:



We did have a couple of additional projects to do. One was to make a small cubbyhole cabinet, to fill in five inches of space next to the dishwasher; we figure it will be good for baking sheets and so on. We made a simple box of plywood, and put the Ikea cabinet legs on it, with a front stained to (sort of) match the cabinet doors. You can see it (without the front yet) in the first picture above. We also had to build a soffit over the sink to hold a light fixture. We ended up building a frame out of 2x2s to attach to the cabinets (which, surprisingly, pretty much fit on the first try) that we'd attach drywall to to form the box. The drywall was an adventure in itself: we went to Home Depot for it, and though we only needed a bit had to get a 4'x8' sheet. It cracked a bit as we were mounting it on Nick's car, then halfway home a large piece of it broke off and blew away, disintegrating somewhere on Aurora. We managed to get it reattached and inch home without more incidents (and without the rain starting again -- rain is not good for drywall). Anyway, here are pictures of the us making the cabinet box, the soffit frame being hung, the drywall attached, and our half-destroyed sheet of drywall.



After the frustrations of the plumbing, it's nice to have something that looks like a kitchen, where many things actually work. What's left? sorting out the oven/cooktop (still under discussion), countertops (which the Corian people will do, once we're ready for them), and tiling the backsplash (I'm currently doodling tiling patterns). Oh, and there's the difficult question of the missing half inch -- it's not clear if the cabinets will even fit alongside the fridge; we're half an inch short.