(Hopefully) The Last Word in Cabinets

On the same day that things were in a downward spiral, there was another incident. The builder brought the framers over to get their measurements so they could figure out the lumber needed. For background, our house has vinyl siding (which was there before us, and doesn't look half bad), and the windows are trimmed out with some kind of aluminum siding. Apparently the framer wanted to get a more accurate measurement on the window that they will be taking out, so he pulled up the window sill siding on one window. Afterwards the builder showed us what the guy did and apologized. I didn't think it was a big deal, since the windows would be coming out in a few weeks anyway. I just asked him to pull off the rest of that piece of siding so there weren't any rough edges, and he did. Even though it wasn't anything to warrant concern, it was just one more thing to make us question the whole undertaking.

Since then things have stopped crashing, and are settling out fairly nicely. On the day that the cabinet shop came out to re-measure, their VP called to apologize for all the confusion. Apparently he runs a lot of the day-to-day stuff at the shop and he had gone out of town for a couple weeks, leaving the rest of the guys (in particular our guy) to pick up the slack. And apparently it was too much for them. So he reassured us and said that if anything else came up to call him personally to get it resolved. It was definitely a nice gesture.

So once the updated cabinet drawings were ready the builder reviewed them with the cabinet shop and the architect before showing them to us. When we saw them they looked pretty good, and we gave them the thumbs-up to place the order. A week or so ago I had asked our builder to let us know how much we were over budget on the cabinets prior to the order, just so there wouldn't be any surprises and everybody would be on the same page. Yesterday when I brought it up I thought he was just playing it down, saying something like "I'm going to work with the cabinet shop to minimize any costs". Eventually I got the point that he was suggesting that they would figure out a way to absorb the cost, and we didn't need to worry about the cabinet budget. So maybe we're not in bad shape with the budget after all. All the shenanigans with the cabinets were not fun, but it's nice to see everyone stepping up and trying to make up for it as best they can.

And another positive budget note - we may have a source for countertops closer to our budget. The cabinet shop reps a few lines, and the builder sent us an email with a link to a few options of Affinity that were within our budget. I'm not sure that we'll go that route, but it's nice to know that we've got an option within budget. I'm also starting to wonder about the cost associated with undermounting a sink with solid surface countertops. A price sheet that I got from Ikea last year had a charge of about $300 for installing an undermount sink. Yikes!!! I doubt that our builder is aware of that, since they seem to be accustomed to installing granite. Either way, I doubt we'll end up going over our budget on countertop/backsplash by nearly as much as we were over budget on cabinets.

So the cabinet order will get placed with the factory on Monday, at which time we'll get a firm ETA (right now they think it will be 4 weeks). We should get an updated schedule toward the middle of next week. I think we've underestimated the amount of packing that we need to do, since we've barely started. And we need a lot more boxes.

Permitting is done (it was finished a couple weeks ago). Appliances have been ordered. Windows have been ordered. We saw doors that we like, but need to get pricing and approval of the architect.

We're starting to roll.