Today my parents came over and helped me work on drawers and door installation – we got most of the way done, but there’s still shelving to put in and a few more upper doors to go, which’ll happen tomorrow, I hope. I dropped something heavy on my toe yesterday, so I’m walking pretty gingerly, and ladders are not really my friends right now.

We discovered that the hinge attachments really need to be shoved in as far as they’ll go by hand, and then screwed, or else the anchor gets all messed up, the hole gets stripped, and you end up having to glue a dowel into the hole to screw into. It’s frustrating. Also, one of my drawers got wet somehow – I’m still trying to work out how, since all my cabinets were in a pile on top of 2x4s to avoid that very problem, and it’s the only one. Anyway, that meant the particle board base swelled just enough that it wouldn’t slide into the sides. Luckily, my dad came up with the plan to cut off the swelled end and replace it with a chunk of plywood – it’s in the back of a bottom drawer, so that section will hardly ever be seen. So he spent most of the afternoon fine-tuning the plywood, since it had to have the right grooves to connect to the sides, and there’s not a lot of leeway. He did succeed, though, and now that drawer is in with all the others.

Today I didn’t do real clean-up before the photos, since we’re mid-door-installation, and putting everything away only to pull it all out again seemed silly – also, y’all have been getting the prettified version of the kitchen, while it’s usually full of cardboard and plastic bags from screws and various tools lying about. So tonight’s shots show a mid-level of the usual total chaos.