Eastern Parkway Project Renovation Poll

The Fruits of Our Labor

After nearly a year of renovation work, our apartment finally looks like a home. We completed everything we wanted to complete as “Phase One” of our renovations. An additional project of getting storage units installed in the basement of our building allowed us to have a place to store the work materials we wanted to hold on to (ladders, Shopvac. paint brushes, etc.) and personal belongings we didn’t have room to house in our apartment (moving from an apartment with seven closets to one with three was a challenge.)

No longer a construction site, I am happy to share the before, during and after images of the fruits of our labor. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Dining Room Before

Dining Room During

Dining Room After

Living Room Before

Living Room During

Living Room After

Bathroom Before

Bathroom During

Bathroom After

Bathroom After

Main Bedroom Before

Main Bedroom During

Main Bedroom After

Second Bedroom Before

Second Bedroom After

Second Bedroom After

Hallway Before

Hallway After

Kitchen Before

Kitchen During

Kitchen After

Kitchen After

Kitchen After

 

A Terrible Tile Tale with a Happy Ending

If you’ve been a regular reader of The Eastern Parkway Project, you know that we had a terrible time getting the countertop and tile floor and backsplash installed in our kitchen. We hired Lifestyle Marble and Granite to handle all three tasks. However, after botching the countertop fabrication, Dave, the owner, decided to give us back our money rather than complete the job (See Counterop Catastrophe).

 

While it was great to get our money back, we were left without a floor or countertop and just the beginnings of a backsplash.

 

 

 

Fortunately we were able to find other companies to complete the countertop and tile floor installations. (Shout out to Ecounters.com and Lowe’s respectively.) But companies we sought out for the backsplash either didn’t handle backsplash installations or they wanted to charge us the cost of doing a backsplash installation from scratch.

 

I was left with no other choice but to attempt to complete the backsplash installation myself. Since I’d never done this before, I consulted several Web sites and home repair books to figure out exactly what I needed to do.

 

Armed with a wealth of information, I headed to my local Home Depot to rent a wet saw. However, once I got there I discovered that the saw was much too heavy for me to take home by myself. It was around Christmas and my husband had left early to spend time with his family. I was going to be joining him the next week and wanted to be able to surprise him with a finished backsplash when we both returned home.

 

So I asked the salesperson in the tile department if a regular manual tile cutter could handle diagonal cuts, as the design of our backsplash called for many of these. He assured me that it could, so I purchased the tile cutter and headed home to tackle this daunting task.

 

I quickly learned that, yes, the manual tile cutter can make diagonal cuts; however, for each triangle I needed, it took three or four tries to get the exact size tile for the space that needed to be filled. After about five hours I had completed the wall the tile abandoner had started, minus a few pieces behind the stove that need to be notched, a task my little manual tile cutter was not capable of.

 

As I prepared to begin the adjacent wall, I discovered that the wall was not even (thanks to Best Wall Plastering. See If These Walls Could Talk). While I had become quite handy with Durabond over the course of our renovation work, leveling the wall was beyond my capabilities. With our renovation funds running low, this wasn’t a task we wanted to hire a professional to handle, especially given our multiple bad experiences with previous contractors. Luckily, my father is quite handy in this area. The only catch was we would need to wait until spring for my father’s next visit. (Winters in western New York are not good for driving). So we spent five months with the backsplash looking like this:

 

 

 

As my father will tell you, I’m a very impatient woman. However, I waited out the winter without complaint. But I was all too happy when the first signs of spring arrived so my father could make his journey to Brooklyn by car. But then needed repairs at his own home required us to wait until May for him to visit.

 

Once my father arrived, he smoothed out the defective wall and we were able to go to Home Depot to rent a wet saw. While the wet saw made cutting notches out of tiles easier, it still took a couple of tries to get the tiles exactly as I needed them. After working for six hours two days in a row, I was able to complete laying the tiles.

 

As an avid viewer of HGTV, I’d seen horror stories of homeowners attempting to grout tiles. This caused me to wait a whole month before taking on the task. Just like laying the tiles, grouting was an arduous task. It took about four hours from start to finish, but all the effort was worth it because in the end we had this….

 

 

 

The Floor Refinishing Fiasco

So, quite some time has passed since my last post. I was waiting for the complete resolution of one of our renovation disasters before I could share the tale. If you’ve been following this blog, you know the apartment we purchased hadn’t received the TLC it deserved and on top of that we had some heavy plastering and painting done prior to moving in. That combination left us with some pretty unappealing hardwood floors.

So before we moved in we decided to have the floors in our living room, dining room and hallway refinished. I called two floor refinishing companies. Both took time to come out to see the floors; however, one never followed up to provide an estimate and the other refused to provide references because he thought they were useless (I wonder what he was trying to hide.)

After searching extensively online, I found a company that offered the exact service we were looking for so I called to get more information. The woman I spoke with was very friendly and even provided references when I asked for them. My husband called the references and received glowing reviews. Based on that and receiving an estimate that matched our budget and a delivery time frame that fit our tight schedule, we set up an appointment for Monday, September 24.

The week prior to our appointment, my husband, my father and I worked nearly around the clock to get as much painting done as possible—tackling the living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway. (See A Dash of Color for the painting story.)

On Sunday evening, we crammed everything that had been in the living and dining room into the kitchen and sealed off the doorways to block out the dust that would be created during the job. Sunday evening while reviewing the flooring company paperwork again I noticed that their sanding machines required a 220v electrical outlet. While we had had the electrical system in our apartment upgraded, the job did not include the installation of a 220v outlet–we didn’t have the need for one.

Concerned this detail would prevent the workers from completing the job, I called the flooring company Monday morning. The representative assured me they could get around this issue by tapping into our apartment’s circuit breaker box for power.

Relieved that the job could go on, my husband met the workers from the flooring company Monday morning. They created sample patches on the floor of the three stains we would be choosing from. Strangely, on the floor, the colors all looked the same. We picked Minwax Early American—a darker tone than the existing stain that would complement our rich wall colors.

My husband watched the workers set up the floor sander and get started. Confident everything was ok, he left the apartment. You may be thinking, “Why would you leave workers alone in your home?” Well, there are only six rooms in our tiny apartment. Three of them were stuffed with furniture, two were being worked on, and all six were off of the hallway, which would also be refinished, so there was nowhere for dear hubby to go to escape the massive sawdust clouds.

About two hours after he left, my husband received a call from a neighbor informing him that there was a serious problem. Apparently the workers determined they were not getting enough power from the circuit breaker box in our apartment, so without our knowledge or approval they found the building’s super and asked for access to the building’s circuit breaker box for more power—and our always accommodating super obliged. But by tapping into the circuit breaker box, the flooring workers blew a fuse that knocked out power in an entire line of apartments in our building. (The better solution would have been for the workers to return to their office to get a sander that was compatible with a 120v outlet, which the company had but never mentioned, but apparently that never occurred to them.)

Fortunately, power was not lost in our apartment and the flooring workers were able to complete the sanding and come in the next day to apply the polyurethane to finish the job. Boy, did our floors look great!!!

But that’s not the end of the story.

An electrician had to be called to replace the blown fuse. In addition, our next door neighbor who works from home lost the work she had been doing on her computer when the power went out.

Days later we received an email from the co-op board informing us that the cost of the fuse replacement would be taken out of the $1,000 security deposit we provided when we started our renovation work. In addition, our security deposit would also be used to cover the cost of replacing our neighbor’s fried computer modem and $500 worth of work she estimated was lost because of the power outage.

We, of course, thought this was unfair, because it was our contractor, not us, who caused the damage. After several months of going back and forth with the co-op board, the flooring company and our attorney, I was able to get the flooring company to pay for the cost of the fuse replacement and the board not to garnish our security deposit to pay for our neighbor’s lost work.

As the incident happened just a week before we moved in, our first couple of months living in the building were a little awkward. Luckily, any bad feelings have dissipated and we are now all living in co-op harmony…and we still think our floors look fabulous.

See for yourself:

Before

After

 

When Life Gives You Lemons (Or Seafoam Green Bathroom Fixtures)

When we first saw the bathroom in the place that is now our home, we were stunned…and not in a good way. After viewing the pictures below, you’ll probably wonder why we went forward with the purchase.

(That’s just dirt in there.)

Because we hated the color of the bathroom fixures so much we immediately determined that we would be performing a gut renovation on the room, so the hole in the wall and the dirty toilet were a non-issue.

Since the building was completed in 1915 and still had its original pipes, it was recommended that we replace those as part of the renovation. Our plumber told us he could do this, retile the room and install new fixtures for a mere $18,000. After reassessing the kitchen and discovering that the gas range didn’t work, the refrigerator was on its last leg, and there was way too little cabinet or countertop space, we determined that the kitchen would take priority given our limited renovation funds. (See Cooking Up A New Kitchen and Now We’re Cooking With Gas)

But we still had to do something about the bathroom. Luckily, during the final walkthrough the day we closed, we discovered that the previous owners had come in the night before and thoroughly cleaned the bathroom. And boy did those bathroom fixtures glisten! Suddenly, that unusual green wasn’t as unsightly as we once thought. And after doing some research on bathroom design we learned that sink style and the use of vibrant color were all the rage at some point (most likely the 1950s) as illustrated in the Kohler ad below.

So here’s what we did to try to make the room welcoming and complementary to the rich colors of the rest of our apartment.

• Repaired the gaping hole in the wall and installed a mirrored medicine cabinet
• Painted the yellow walls white
• Replaced the wooden toilet seat with a darker brown one (because, honestly, where would we find a toilet seat cover the exact green of the toilet bowl.)
• Stripped the white window and door moldings and repainted them a dark brown
• Installed new towel bars
• Removed rust from existing shower curtain rod and painted it silver
• Purchased towels and bathroom accessories to build on the green and dark brown color scheme
• Made a window shade to pick up the green in the bathroom, and also bring in some of the rich colors (reds and golds) from the rest of the house. I also made a matching hand towel. (The hand towel project finally gave me a chance to prove to my husband that I can sew. He’d been in doubt because I never completed the skirt I started nearly five years ago after receiving a sewing machine for Christmas.)

So here are the results:

We’d eventually like to repaint the walls to warm up the room even more. If anyone has any color suggestions, please share them by clicking the comments link below.

Now We’re Cooking With Gas

If you’ve been following our blog you are well aware of the many problems we’ve encountered renovating our kitchen. First, the kitchen cabinet company shipped the wrong sink base cabinet, which delayed the installation of all our kitchen cabinets for three weeks (see Delivery Day). Then the company we hired to install our countertop and tile floor and backsplash botched the countertop fabrication and then refused to finish the job (see Counterop Catastrophe). Well, I’m happy to say that after months of eating microwaved frozen dinners our kitchen is 90% done. (It will be a few months before my father can visit to help us complete the remaining 10%, but I couldn’t wait that long to show off our new kitchen.)

Here’s what we’ve accomplished over these challenging months:

• Stripped kitchen of existing cabinets and appliances. Pulled up linoleum tile floor and plywood subfloor. (see Cooking Up A New Kitchen)
• New electrical wiring and outlets installed (see Our New Home)
• Plaster walls repaired after electrical work (see If These Walls Could Talk)
• Hot and cold water pipes and waste drain moved from center of kitchen wall to corner
• Patched approximately 2 foot by 2 1/2 foot hole in kitchen floor where dumbwaiter had been located
• Converted pantry into space for refrigerator with custom bookshelf on top
• Walls and ceiling primed and painted
• Kitchen cabinets installed
• Quartz countertop and undermount sink installed
• Tile floor installed
• Ceiling fan light and undercabinet lighting installed
• Removed existing base and shoe molding. Primed, painted and installed new base and shoe molding.
• Window and door moldings patched, primed and painted
• New refrigerator, range and microwave installed

The only thing left to complete is the backsplash. The tile guy we hired only completed half a wall before walking off the job. I purchased a manual tile cutter in hopes of finishing the job. In the process I discovered some pieces could only be cut using a wet saw, which was too heavy for me to lug home from Home Depot by myself. In addition, I learned that the wall along the hallway is not level and needs to be smoothed out by someone with more experience working with plaster than I have before the tiles can be applied. (That’s where my father comes in.)

But that’s just cosmetic work. What really matters is that the sink is finally connected, which means we no longer have to wash our dishes in the bathroom sink. And all of our appliances are hooked up, so we’re finally able to enjoy home-cooked meals.

The following pictures illustrate the kitchen transformation:

Kitchen Before
(Note: The before pictures don’t capture the excessive levels of

grime that covered the cabinets, appliances and window.)

Kitchen After

Two Rooms Down…

After five months of working on our apartment, we’ve finished the main living areas–the living room and dining room. Actually the work in these rooms was completed a month or so ago. It’s taken me that long to find a new place to store the work tools and materials that had been housed in these rooms (they have a new home in our long hallway) and get the rooms photo ready.

Here’s what was done in both rooms:

• Removed miles and miles of telephone and security alarm wiring from around the living room baseboards and windows
• New electrical wiring and outlets installed (see Our New Home)
• Plaster walls repaired after electrical work (see If These Walls Could Talk)
• Walls were primed and painted (see A Dash of Color)
• Window and door moldings and additional wood work were repaired, primed and painted
• Wood floors were refinished
• A new ceiling fan and sconces were installed in the living room and a new chandelier was installed in the dining room
• Custom wood window blinds were installed in both rooms

There are a few finishing touches I’d eventually like to add, like some area rugs and perhaps a nice floor plant, but here are the results of our hard labor:

Living Room Before

Living Room After

(Note: The wall color is not as orange in person. It’s browner, more like a deep russett.)

Dining Room Before

Dining Room After

The Power Suit

Since we closed on our apartment on August 2007, we’ve had myriad problems with contractors—Bestwall Plastering’s shoddy plastering work (If These Walls Could Talk), Park Slope Kitchen Gallery’s cabinet order error (Delivery Day), a major mishap with the floor refinishing company (fodder for a future blog entry) and a failed kitchen countertop fabrication by Lifestyle Marble and Granite (Countertop Catastrophe). But the contractor who seemed to be the most frustrating in terns of getting the job done was the first contractor we hired–the electrician who handled the electrical upgrade of our apartment.

These challenges were particularly difficult for my husband. He shares the story of how he dealt with the dawdling electrician in the following entry:

I’d had enough. I was tired of all the contractors screwing us around. I was tired of work not getting done. I was tired and sick, which, as you know, is usually phrased in reverse.

So when my wife told me the electrician was finally coming to finish up the job, he bore the brunt of my tiredness. He had, in my opinion, been doing his best Stepin Fetchit when it came to putting the finishing touches on our house. The electricians started in August, and it was December—DECEMBER! And they still hadn’t finished. He would speak with my wife, say he was coming on a certain day, and then not show up. Or show up late. Or show up but not have the necessary tools, so he’d leave on an errand that should take 20 minutes, but not come back for two hours.

This time I wasn’t having it. But there was something else going on, too. I had grown
so tired of the unfinished state of the apartment that I wasn’t pulling my weight with the renovations either. I knew it. My wife knew it. I had joked with friends and family about it. I was tired of that, too! I needed a solution.

Lately, at work, I had been dressing up. I did it to change how I felt about myself and how others would view me. Instead of my standard casual dress, I was all about sports coats and ties. It had worked. More and more, people were viewing me as someone in charge. So I decided to try something.

The day the electrician was to arrive, I put on my suit. I hadn’t planned to wear a suit that day. Heck, I wasn’t even going to work. But the electrician didn’t know that.

The electrician was supposed to arrive by 9 am. At 8:06, I called him.

“You are coming to my house today at what time?” I inquired.
“Maybe around 10,” he said.
“I need you here at 9,” I replied.
“OK,” he said.
“Not a moment later,” I said, and before he could respond, I hung up.

At 9:02, he hadn’t arrived, so I called him again.

“Where are you?” I said, dispensing with all niceties.
“I’m on my way.”
“You were supposed to be here at 9. It’s 9:03. Where are you?”

He told me the street he was on. I asked him for the cross streets. He told me.
“So you should be here in five minutes,” I said.

And he was.

Once he arrived, it was more of the same. But it had to be done. This was someone who had proved he viewed coddling and being nice and accommodating as a pathway to extending the job ad infinitum. Like I said at the start, however, I’d had enough of that. He was going to finish today.

I told the electrician his first task. I hovered over him as he worked. When he finished, I gave him his second job. Then his third. Then his fourth. And you know what? Within an hour or so, he had completed all the work. It was tiring for me to watch over him, but after four months. we at last had all our outlets covered, all extraneous wires snipped, etc. When he finally left, I took off my suit, and enjoyed the rest of the day knowing the job was done and I was back on the road to becoming an active contributor to our home renovation.

Counterop Catastrophe

The kitchen cabinet installation was pretty uneventful, outside of the workers showing up late both days and the company trying to charge us $200 more than the original quote. (Luckily, I saved the email with the original estimate.)

After finally getting our cabinets installed, the next step was the countertop. From the first day we visited Park Slope Kitchen Gallery, my husband and I fell in love with the Silestone Mahogany countertop. We’d planned to order our countertop from Park Slope Kitchen Gallery, but after the cabinet mix up, things began to get a little sketchy. Since the cabinet installers had charged us for the day of work lost because the wrong cabinet was delivered, we thought it only fair that Park Slope Kitchen Gallery reimburse us for that expense. They agreed to do so, however, instead of giving us the money they wanted to give us a discount on the countertop. This would have been fine but the numbers didn’t add up.

Prior to ordering the cabinets, we were quoted a price of $2000 for the countertop. Now that we were ready to order, they were saying the countertop would be $2800 but they would only charge us the ‘at cost’ price of $2200. Now we did make a modification to the countertop layout by moving the sink from the middle of the countertop to the corner, but that didn’t seem to merit a 40% increase in price. I decided to get quotes from other countertop retailers and fabricators. All delivered retail cost quotes between $2100 and $2500, much lower than the retail cost cited by Park Slope Kitchen Gallery. (I later learned that the design change caused by moving the sink should have only increased the cost an average of $150.)

After a measurement appointment and a glowing reference check, we decided to go with Lifestyle Marble and Granite. Since the company also handled tile installation, we also hired them to install our tile floor and backsplash.

Two weeks later, Dave, the company’s owner arrived with our new countertop. My husband took the day off to oversee the installation. He emailed a picture of the installed countertop to me at work. Boy did it look beautiful against our golden brown cabinets. Yet there was one thing that stood out to me in the picture. See if you notice it.

Yup. The overhang over the corner cabinet is way too small. While the countertop extended beyond the cabinets on the left and right 1 1/4″, it only extended 3/4″ over the corner cabinet. Unfortunately, my husband didn’t notice this while Dave was there. (The area was blocked most of the afternoon as Dave worked on the backsplash.) Dave called in sick the next day so we had to wait until the following day to talk to him. When we asked him about the issue, he admitted that it was his error. He agreed to order a new countertop and correct the error, free of charge. In the meantime, Dave would install the tile floor. Content that the issue had been resolved, my husband and I went off to work.

As soon as I got to work I received a phone call from my father, who was visiting at the time, informing me that Dave didn’t want to complete our job anymore. (Something about losing too much money.) He had packed up his tile saw and other tools and would remove the flawed countertop and return our deposit the next day.

We were completely surprised… and highly annoyed. Dave’s decision not to complete the work meant we’d have to start from scratch to find another countertop fabricator and tile installer. It also meant we’d have more weeks of frozen dinners ahead of us.

Delivery Day

We waited patiently for five weeks for our new kitchen cabinets to arrive. When the delivery day came, we were very excited. To recount the events of the day, I’m turning the keyboard over to my husband who was home to accept the delivery.

Thanks to my beloved wife for letting me handle this one.

I took off three weeks from work from mid-September until early October. We had arranged for the kitchen cabinets to be delivered the last Friday in September; installation was scheduled for the Monday. My wife and I couldn’t help but dream that the end of our renovation work was near, at least as far as the kitchen was concerned. Once the cabinets were installed, getting the countertop and flooring would be a snap. We were so cute in our naivete, weren’t we?

Even after the debacle with the walls (see If These Walls Could Talk—and likely future blogs), I had few fears. Our dealings with Park Slope Kitchen Gallery had been great. The saleswoman was topnotch and gave both of us great confidence that this job would go smoothly. The only potential pitfall was that this was supposed to be a curbside delivery, meaning the delivery people wouldn’t carry the cabinets up to the apartment. But I knew the $20 bills in my wallet would solve that issue. Besides, if they didn’t, I figured that with enough time I could carry the cabinets myself.

The delivery guys arrived about 20 minutes late, and when I went to greet them—an older guy and young guy—at their truck, the older man looked at me and said ‘It’s just you?’ I nodded, and he said, ‘This is supposed to be curbside.’ I told him about my twenties, and he and his younger partner agreed to help. Thank goodness they did. I thought the dozens of boxes in the truck were for multiple deliveries. Nope. They were just for us.

The first box was huge. 37 inches by 37 inches by 37 inches. I don’t know what it weighed, but even though the young guy and I each grabbed an end, we struggled carrying it upstairs. The front door to our apartment is only 28 inches wide, but I wasn’t too worried. After all, the saleswoman from the cabinet place had been to our home and took extensive and meticulous measurements, so she wouldn’t have ordered something that wouldn’t fit inside, right? I left it, knowing I’d be able to take it out of the box and get it in that way.

Unloading everything took about a half hour. A second box also wouldn’t fit, but I made the same assumption about it as the other box, so again I wasn’t too concerned. I offered a $20 bill to both delivery guys, but the older guy (who had stayed with the truck) told me to just give it to the young guy. They left, I unwrapped the second large box, and successfully maneuvered the contents through the doorway.

Then I went for the first box, the 37-inch one. Unwrapped it. “Oh no,’ I said. (Those aren’t the actual words, but this is a family blog.) Inside was a solid piece that was nearly as big as the box it came in. I didn’t even try to get it through the doorway. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

I called the saleswoman and she eventually determined that the company had delivered the wrong piece. We were supposed to have received only the front piece and bottom of this corner piece, but they had delivered the entire corner cabinet. She told me they’d be able to pick it up the next day, but getting the correct piece would take two weeks.

I had really liked this saleswoman, a very together young woman. Though her news was extremely aggravating, there was nothing to do except say OK. But I couldn’t leave this huge cabinet in the hallway. My wife and I had just had a run-in with one of our new neighbors over another construction issue (see future blogs, certainly), and I was really trying to upset her even more. So I had to move the box, somehow.

There was no way I could pick it up—I couldn’t even get my arms around it. But I could slide it. Down the flight of stairs, through the landing, down the next flight, and then push it under the stairs where our fellow tenants keep their baby strollers. I measured the first flight of stairs. It was 37-1/4 inches wide, same as the second set of stairs. Like Theo Huxtable might say, ‘No problem.’

With some effort I slid the box to the stairs then guided it to the bottom of the first flight. Once on the landing, I pulled it to the other set of stairs. That’s when I hit a roadblock. This stairwell was 37-1/4 inches wide, but an overhang that I hadn’t previously noticed jutted out 3 inches. I struggled with the box for about 30 minutes—hopping over it several times to alternately push and pull it—and was really frustrated and exhausted. But I realized that unless I could lift it over my shoulders, moving the box past the overhang was impossible. And that was out of the question.

It was about 5 p.m., and someone was coming home from work. But the box was on the landing, and since I couldn’t pull it down or carry it back up, there was no way around it. I could hear the footsteps coming closer. I absolutely panicked. For any of you familiar with the Incredible Hulk, you know what happened to me. I had an adrenaline surge that made me stronger than I’ve ever been.

I pushed the giant box to the edge of the stairs leading back up to our apartment. I then reached over the box, grabbed the far end, shifted my weight and voila, the box was in the air—by just a few inches, but that was enough. I carried it up the stairs, not believing what I was doing. When I reached the top, the surge fled and my arms almost literally crumbled. They were shaking and my biceps and triceps felt like they had been blown up for three or four days afterward. I pushed the box to our door, and since it wasn’t blocking anything, I left a note on it explaining what happened.

The next day, luckily, a friend of one of the other tenants helped me carry the box to the first floor where it sat underneath the stairs, beside the strollers. I left another note, and no one ever said a word about it. But the same day, the saleswoman called to let me know they wouldn’t be able to pick up the box until Monday. I guess I was still channeling the Hulk and became enraged. I told her I would take the box outside and leave it on the street. She seemed a little caught off guard and told me to go ahead if that’s what I had to do. (We later learned from the cabinet store manager that she had originally ordered the wrong piece, and some of the other deals she made with us came off a little shady. Renovation Rule #1: Contractors and salespeople may be friendly, but they are not your friends!)

Since the box would be there until Monday, we decided to keep our cabinet installation appointment for that day and the following in hopes that the workers would be able to take the cabinet apart and bring it into the apartment.

That didn’t work and since this was the corner piece of all the base cabinets, they couldn’t install any of the cabinets. The installers charged us a fee for not being able to work that day and we had to reschedule the installation. We discovered that because of shipment schedules, we actually wouldn’t get our new sink base for three weeks and the lead cabinet installer, whom we had done so much research on, would not be available then. Eager to move the process along, we agreed to have the installation handled by the guy’s right-hand man. Meanwhile, we would have to live in our apartment with 25 boxes of cabinets until the new installation date arrived nearly a month later.

The cabinet company didn’t actually take the giant box away until Tuesday, but by then I had calmed down. Three weeks later, the correct piece was delivered, also to curbside. It was a little thing. I carried it inside, proudly, with one hand.