After looking at what we had and where we could go with our (bigger than the cabinet guy thought) kitchen this morning, Donna and I devised a plan that we thought was great. We took the 15″ wastebasket base cabinet that we were going to return and put it on the wall where we had 15″ more room. As a bonus it was a perfect fit to cover up the awkward heating vent to the adjacent room that couldn’t be moved and it placed the trash can in a sweet spot between the sink and the dishwasher. To make the top cabinets match we would then need to buy an additional 15″ wall unit. On the stove side we would take down the 12″ inch cabinet off the wall, return it, along with the 12″ base cabinet and replace them with 21″ cabinets to fill up nearly all of the “extra” 12 inches on the that wall.
The contractor arrived and pitched his idea, buy 4 new 12″ cabinets and add them to the ends on both walls of what we now had. This would work to his best advantage as he could finish installing what we had on hand and then add the new stuff when it showed up. We shot him down for a couple reasons, the main one was something that Donna has been against from the git go, she didn’t want anything to the left of the stove, between it and the door. The cabinet guy originally wanted to put a 9″ thing there and now here was the contractor proposing something 12 inches wide there. Another one is that we didn’t want any more 12″ cabinets or any at all now that we’ve seen one and realized there isn’t much you can put it in one of them.
After the confab with our contractor we went over to Lowe’s in North Augusta and chatted with our cabinet guy. He was apologetic and we kept it civil. He ordered up the 3 new needed cabinets and also ordered a no cost replacement for one of the ones we received where the doors didn’t look straight and wouldn’t close completely. He is going to expedite them, so hopefully we will get them in a week to 10 days instead of the 4 weeks the original order took. Now because of the configuration changes we will get to return some of the already ordered stuff and that will cover about 60% of the cost of the three new cabinets, so it is not a staggering expenditure.
The contractor and some friends thought that we shouldn’t have to pay any more money to make things right, but Donna and I are more pragmatic than that. Sure cabinet guy mis-measured, but the contractor himself should have caught it if he had actually measured instead of just eyeballing the cabinet guy’s print outs and signing off on them. Heck, I should have noticed the difference myself because I had measured the kitchen when I drew up plans for the granite people to use to quote the counter tops with. We figured had the cabinet guy measured right, or someone noticed the difference in the lengths somewhere along the line, we would have been spending that much more on the right sized cabinets anyway. The only real harm done is we will be without a kitchen for a couple weeks longer which when all is said and done will seem like nothing.
Almost about the time we got back home from North Augusta the Emperor hit the 130,000 mile mark.
Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1201
