More whoops

The fridge got put in place on Saturday. Somehow. By somebody. One of those processes we're glad we didn't see.

Awaiting front panels

The hood fan got installed, too -- mostly.

Fan in place, but no chimney cover

You can see that there's no chimney cover for the exhaust pipe. The installer dude took it away to cut it to size. I thought this would be a problem as I thought you first put the fan in place, then tiled the backsplash, and the backsplash dude was due today.

Well, the backsplash dude arrived and it turns out I was really wrong -- in great part because we are using small (1" square) glass tiles, the tiles must go on the wall before the hood fan and chimney. So the fan had to come off the wall, then the wall could get tiled, then the fan has to be re-mounted. All that work installing the thing on Saturday was for naught.

Hood fan removed 

Back to Friday

I thought the tiler dude could install the backsplash behind the sink, but also apparently not, at least not without some adjustments. Turns out that in our not-very-square house, the gap between the wall and the back of the countertop is too wide to mount the tiles.

The gap at the back

It starts at the cabinet on the left, but is gone by the pencil mark

Tiler dude wanted us to place a very thick skim coat of mud on the wall to level it out. We don't like that idea because the mud dude is the messiest slob on the planet, and it would take at least a week of daily mess making to build up. Our solution is to cut a filler strip of countertop (from the sink cut out) and glue it in place, kinda like this:

Gap filled by a wedge of wood. Tile sitting on that wood.

It will mean a seam in the laminate. It will mean a slightly visible repair job. But better that than the mud dude making a mess again.

So one of my contractor dudes came by, and voila, in 30 minutes, the gap was filled and you can barely tell we had a gap at all.

Small wedge in place

Now, when do you suppose the tiler dude will return?