New Kitchen Cabinets and Countertops

This was a fun project, but definitely inconvenient. I appreciated the help we received from my brother, my mom, and my step-father. They drove up from Tennessee to tear down the old cabinets and haul them off for us. Mom is using them in her garage area.

We had to set up a temporary kitchen in the unfinished basement (I thought I took pictures of it but apparently I did not), which was a real challenge. I managed to do OK with it except that we were now making the basement smell really yummy. Well, I gained a little furry friend (or I should say enemy) thanks to the aroma!! After several attempts and several different types of traps, I went on-line to see what could be done. I added duct tape to the traps, put them in a row, etc. and then also made a trap where the mouse goes up a ramp, cross a bottle, goes out on the neck to get the peanut butter, but slips on the Vaseline and falls into the bucket of water and drowns. I had hoped to see this work, but my little friend crossed all the other traps without tripping them, except for the one just before the homemade trap....SNAP, it got him!

All else was fairly smooth sailing. We had a damaged upper corner cabinet (due to shipping) and had to wait on a replacement, but it arrived on schedule and was installed as planned after the countertops were put in. I had wanted pidgeon holes over the desk area (it was a cabinet piece), but it didn't work out because Lowe's wasn't aware that it couldn't be installed without cabinets on each side of the pidgeon holes. Oh well. I'm just happy to have received the additional upper cabinet over the desk area.

The crews were all fantastic, especially the cabinet installers. They even installed my ipod player and carried the stove across the room and hooked it up even though we hadn't paid for those services. They did an A+ service. (Township Services of Amelia, Ohio)

The pictures are hopefully in the order they occurred. I'll start off with some of the old cabinets, then teardown, a couple of progress shots, then the final pictures.

I'll have to wash everything that's to go back into the kitchen, so I suppose I'll be doing that after Thanksgiving (and before Christmas). I'm looking forward to getting some use out of my beautiful new kitchen! (I have a new microwave and new sink and faucet too!) Thanks Russ for indulging my wish to have a remodeled kitchen! :)