Day 6

Sometimes I hate being right. I was right about having forgotten to move the outlet and phone line from behind the location of the new pantry. As the first photo in the Day 6 slide show clearly shows, they simply cut out spots from the back panel of the pantry so they'd stick through. Though it turns out the electrician would not have moved the phone line anyway. I'll have to get someone else out to the house to do that. Sure would have been nice had Sol mentioned that at some point, eh?

Anyway, right now we've got most of the lower cabinets installed. The drawer fronts and cabinet doors are not ready yet, but they don't get installed until the end anyway. What we can see though, we love. The drawers are good and solid quality, will full extension pull-outs. The pantry is huge, just as we wanted. The island is strong and we can already tell the pull-out spice rack next to the oven is going to be a great help. It looks wide enough to also hold bottles of oil and maybe even cans of coffee. I think the person who came up with this idea should be memorialized in one of those Bud Light salute commercials: "Here's to you, Mr. Cabinet Pull-Out Spice Rack Inventor." (I still won't drink Bud Light though. Bleah...)

But the goodwill of seeing actual cabinets was tempered somewhat when I got the first part of the electrician's bill. Everything that had been discussed as part of the initial project was dead-on. What I didn't know was that he added $60 for each under-cabinet light and $60 for each of the two pendant lights that were outside of the initial scope. Granted, I didn't ask Sol how much they'd be, though he didn't tell me either. It'll also cost at least $25 to install the lights I had to buy elsewhere, which means there's a total of around $765 I had not accounted for in my budget. Fuck! So the under-cabinet lighting alone will end up costing me nearly a grand. They'd better look spectacular when they're done.

And on top of everything else, Sol has left messages for the plumber about the inflated bill, but the plumber has not returned his call.