Ready to go

Thursday night, the cabinet installation dude finished. It took us most of the day Friday to clean up his mess; there was dust and sawdust everywhere. There are still a bunch of things on his "but" list, but we got to where we needed to be in order to go to Maui.

Main prep space. Microwave lives in the cubbyhole 

Eating bar on left. Space for dishwasher. Sink on right. 

Hole for the fridge. Stove on the extreme left. Pantry on right. 

The prep space again. Stove on right. Hole in counter for quartz block 

View as you enter. Eating bar in foreground.

Among the items on our "but" list:

• We are missing a cabinet. It's a wall cabinet that will be to the left of the sink with an appliance garage under it. Apparently, they built it, installed the sliding aluminum/glass doors, and nothing worked, so it had to be re-made.
• The electrician dude put the boxes in the ceiling for the pendants that hang over the eating bar in the wrong place. They are ~8" off centre, putting them in head banging territory. I really don't know what we can do about this.
• There's supposed to be an electrical outlet built into that cabinet. However, the wires for it come out of the wall about 10" to the left of the cabinet.

The bend in the wire is about the end of where the cabinet should be.

• We're installing an Insinkerator tap for instant hot water. The mini water heater lives under the sink. But the power for it comes into the back of the next cabinet over.

Electrical cord in the back of the garbage cupboard

• Our broom cupboard is designed with a shelf in the middle -- at a height too low to put in any brooms. It has to be cut out, and a new permanent shelf has to be put in higher up.

The brown shelf is permanent

We also ended up with "spare parts" including:

• An entire extra sheet of countertop laminate;
• Not 1, but 2 front panels for the dishwasher;
• 4 shelves that don't fit any cupboard we have.

Our landscaper dude never showed up this week like he promised he would. We have only been trying to get him here since August. So on Thursday, KC and I spent 2 hours hauling 30+ wheelbarrow loads of dirt to our water well. The ground settled there over last winter, making a depression around the well. This is bad, since in encourages surface runoff to collect there which can run down around the casing and contaminate my water. Landscaper dude was supposed to fill the pit this past spring when he dug my foundation, but there was a dumpster in his way. So he was supposed to fill it when he did the landscaping, but he remains a no-show. So on what we were convinced to be the last reasonable day of weather this year (sunny and +11°), we did it by hand, and re-graded the area so water will run off it. I forgot to take a picture after we were finished. But I was certainly correct about the last nice day prediction, since here's what it looks like today:

The grade looks great. I promise.

For yes, it snowed, and the forecast for the upcoming week is for cold (highs rarely above freezing) and more snow. As such, essentially no more landscaping will get done this fall (and we're not letting them do it while we are away). Our back yard will remain a dirt pile, and in the spring when everything melts and it starts to rain, we will be awash in a sea of mud.

We did receive a replacement window this week. We decided the rotted old window in our formerly leaky stairwell had to go.

The window in question, from a few weeks back

The new window wasn't that expensive, but the delivery charge was huge -- about half the price of the window. So we arranged to go into Calgary Thursday and pick it up ourselves, while taking my cat to Calgary to be pampered by friends while we are away. Imagine our surprise when the window arrived on Wednesday. Ah, well. They'll be painting and installing it while we are gone, and we've said it's OK to fix our broken stair railings and finish painting the now finished stairwell, too.

So we are off to Maui Monday. When we get back in late November (in time for the start of ski season), before we can use the kitchen, we have to:

• Install the missing cabinet, and fix some "but" list items;
• Level the floor, install the in-floor heating and the floor tile;
• Install the appliances and hood fan;
• Install the sink and taps;
• Install the backsplash;
• Hook up all the heating, plumbing and the electrical bits.

Whaddya think. Easter? Welcome to Canmore time.