Kitchen Install – Day 1

It’s been almost a year since we bought our house in St. Petersburg, Florida and it will be a full year by the time we have a functioning kitchen.  M. promised me if we bought this run down house (in a great location by the way) the first thing we would do was totally gut the kitchen and design our dream kitchen.  It took us four designers to finally find Dominion Home Services which is doing both the design and installation of our modern kitchen.

The first quote we got was reasonably price but so boring we had to get another quote.  The second quote was a gorgeous kitchen but it was way over priced and the cabinets were being manufactured in Canada….go figure?  The third company was reasonably priced but he wasted a lot of time talking to us in April and May with tons of great ideas but when it got down to the type of cabinets we wanted he couldn’t deliver.  So now it’s the first week of July 2014  and we are back in Florida and we had one crazy week.  We missed our flight to St. Pete’s out of Niagara Falls due to the July long weekend and border delays we didn’t anticipate. Then we rented a car and drove to Florida and when we arrived we couldn’t find the keys to our car parked at the house.  Then M.  went to return the rental car to the airport while I met with the electrician and the kitchen cabinet guy and M. disappears for hours without a cell phone.  I start thinking the worst, like  the car must of broke down on the interstate so my neighbor calls the highway patrol and state troopers and  everyone is looking for him.  And finally our kitchen guy goes AWOL.  So needless to say we had to take a breather and do some other things like replace the lights on the dock.

A week later,  I am in Home Depot picking up the dock lights and a gentleman from Tennessee (S.J.) comments on the lights saying he could use them at his house too.  We got chatting about renovations and it turns out he was on his third kitchen designer and the last one walked out with some of his money.  S.J. said he has a great person working for him now and she was there right now finishing off his new kitchen.  He gave me her phone number and within an hour  I found my new kitchen designer, we hit it off and the rest is history.  By the end of July, she put together a kitchen design,  found a European cabinet distributor in Miami and we ordered our Italian cabinets which should arrive in 8 to 10 weeks !

Now this is where things go a bit sideways again, because in early October the cabinets and their custom frame arrive at the distributor in Miami from Italy but there was an issue with the custom designed frame for the kitchen cabinets and they need to order a new one.  Since we wouldn’t be here until December,  we told them to go ahead and fix the problem and ship a replacement.  The new cabinet frame arrives just in time for the American Thanksgiving so more delays due to the holiday and the extra long weekend.  Sorting all the pieces from Italy and arranging the delivery of the shipments takes longer than expected, but finally the cabinets are ready to be loaded on a truck and shipped to St. Pete’s.   But depending on who you talk to, either the truck was too small to carry the entire shipment or the axle broke on the truck as it was leaving Miami, they had to repack the entire kitchen in a new truck.  Anyway, the kitchen cabinets finally arrived at our home on Saturday night around 630pm.

The installation began on Sunday but  most of the day was sorting through the boxes and trying to figure out where everything goes and how things go together (the Italian way) and what screws, bolts, etc. go where.  As you can see from the pictures below a couple of the wall cabinets were hung on Sunday which was not easy as the custom frame I was mentioning is 3 inches thick and it will frame these cabinets all the way around even in that little space at the top.  In a few days you will see what I mean.  Monday the installer are finishing off another job, so on Tuesday and Wednesday we should see things coming together in a big way.  Can’t wait to show you the pictures.

Here are a few pictures after the first day of work.