A record of Kitchen Cabinets Are Like Mariah Carey

They are notoriously difficult to work with.

Yesterday was cabinet installation day 2 and, not unlike Monday, it came with its fair share of ups and downs. We will start with the ups this time. Nearly all the cabinets went in, including my new go-to thing: the built in refrigerator! Totally makes our existing fridge look like some fancy schmancy custom appliance. And that opening to the right of it will make our microwave look built in as well. Yippee skippy.

Here are photos of yesterday’s progress:

Ok, now to play Debbie Downer. The minor hiccup of the day was discovering one of our existing wall outlets is too high and needs to be lowered so it does not get blocked by an upper cabinet. No biggie because the electrician was already scheduled to come out anyways. It’ll simply be another few bucks down the yet-to-be-installed drain.

The MAJOR hiccup involved our new microwave. When the installer opened the box to our 30 inch under-cabinet microwave, we discovered that it was in fact a 24 inch countertop microwave. Lowe’s did not simply sell us the wrong microwave, they special ordered the wrong microwave (we waited three weeks for it!!!).

So last night we made an emergency run to Lowe’s, returned the countertop microwave and picked up the right one. The bad news is that it was $75 more than the other one. Ugh. But here is where Lowe’s went and totally redeemed themselves. The manager gave us a sorry-for-the-trouble discount and sold us the new microwave for the price of the old one. I guess we will forgive them for the mix-up.

Now things seem to be in order for a productive day 3 of installation and as long as the kitchen does not go all diva on us again, we are hoping things will end on a high note.