new kitchen, day-two

I’m going to begin by writing about the image on the left. It’s probably one of my favorite images. In reality it’s the inside panel of four cabinet doors above the microwave. The larger image at the end of this post shows the knobs as they are on the cabinets.

I selected drawer-pulls that are large and have a modern design; for the very top cabinets, the glass fronted ones, I selected a blue ceramic knob; the large doors have hidden finger pulls. The two doors above the microwave have the finger pulls. But once the microwave was installed, it mounted beyond the depth of the cabinets so the finger-pulls were inaccessible. I suggested that we use two of the blue ceramic knobs on these doors.

Creating the abstract, vertical image was great fun. It’s a sliver of the left image in the triptych below. I kept cropping until I had what you see on the left. The blue knobs on the cherry stain, the vertical line of symmetry, the cruciform, the different grains. If you look carefully, you can see the finger-pulls on the underside of the top knobs.

The top cabinets came in 3 sections – the largest is above the stove; the smallest is the cabinet in the alcove; and the third sectional is above the sink. The new cabinets doubled the space I had before. Also, the new cabinets were fixed 22 inches above the counter. That is 4 inches higher than standard, but the extra height makes for a more open counter area. (The old cabinets were a whopping 25 inches above the counter-top. The standard is 18 inches. I don’t know why the original contractor put them so high. In the right image in the triptych, the white patch above the stove was the old microwave and the patch to its right was the old above-the-counter cabinet.)

There are some minor fixes that need to happen – the drawer-pulls are very wide and the second drawer in the cabinet closest to the sink can’t open, because is butts against the pulls on the sink cabinet. (My suggestion is that we replace the two pulls on the sink cabinet with something similar, but narrower. And if we find the right replacement, then I want two more smaller/narrower pulls for the spice cabinet. This cabinet is itself narrow and a smaller/narrower pull would look better.)

Tomorrow the electrician comes in to connect the microwave and put power behind the alcove cabinet for TV, cable-box and router-amplifier. The counter-top people aren’t due until the middle of next week. And when the new counter is in, I can get Marty back to hook up the new sink.