#3...don't be a Fool

My kitchen 2009

Today is April Fool's Day, and boy did I see one on HGTV last night. On one of the renovation shows, a guy and his Mom were installing upper kitchen cabinets to the wall. The guy was skipping several key steps like measuring, shimming, leveling. What was totally insane was that he decided to forgo the wall anchor system that came with the cabinets, and simply put a few screws (sans anchors) in to hold up the cabinet. Within a few minutes, (as he is working in another corner of the kitchen,) the whole cabinet falls off the wall, breaking the door fronts and damaging the already installed lower cabinets. It was so hilarious to me, I played it back a few times, all the while telling the guy on TV what an idiot he was.......

Funny thing is, that it was not too long ago that Tyler (my husband) and I installed our own kitchen cabinets. While none came crashing to the ground, the project was plagued with problems, took us months to complete, and was a total pain.

When we ordered our brand new Kraftmaid cabinets we thought we were being so smart and money savvy by planning to install them ourselves. The salesman shook his head, and strongly urged us to have them professionally installed. We just smiled, knowing how much smarter we were than him.

The cabinets came in 18 boxes the size of a shipping pallet. Our kitchen is a galley style and not even really that big, so the size and amount of boxes that arrived was startling. We spent the first 3 or 4 weeks with our cabinets moving the giant boxes around trying to make pathways that we could squeeze through to get around the house. Sometime after week 6 we began installation. My Dad came to help, and we had grand illusions that we would finish in a weekend. At the end of two days only one bottom cabinet was in place. It was so much harder to level, shim and mount them than we expected.

Fast forward five years, and while the cabinets are all in, we still have yet to put the molding on the top of the cabinets. It would have cost us an extra $1500 to have them installed, which if I ever redo a kitchen again is going to be the first thing I pay for!

Summer 2003