Hold The Flashlight

well upon inspecting the cabinets, 26 boxes, I found 13 to be on poor quality.  Either a door was scratched or a cabinet frame was not square.  Also the clear coat on the wine rack was laughable.

I called woodmark and they immediately sent out the 13 items again.  Sounds good.

Nope!! I got the 13 new boxes, or atleast the damaged parts of the cabinets replaced.  However the wine rack had a gouge in the front of it.  Doesn’t look like this company has quality control.  I called up again and again they immediately send out a replacement.  Now I’m happy they are being so accommodating during this process, but it would have been better to get this right the first time.

Round 3…. this wine rack is out of square and has chipped mdf board on the sides.  this time Home Depot rep, Dave, came out to inspect the cabinet.  At this point I now have 3 wine racks, they never took the old ones.  Dave saw the cabinet and agreed and sent another one.

Round 4!!…. come on!!! how can it be this difficult.  They requested extra packing, implying its the delivery guy who made a poor quality cabinet.  Well they packaged it with bubble wrap this time.  They unfortunately taped the wrap to the face of the cabinet.  I’d love to know their hiring process.  So now they send the woodmark rep.  He finds problems in the cabinet i hadn’t even noticed.  he orders a 5th wine rack.

I am currently waiting on the 5th rack.  At this point I can build a wine cellar with all the extra cabinets.  I can hold 50 bottles of wine for display.  If only 1 of them was of a quality worth displaying in my kitchen.

getting the kitchen ready for the new cabinets was fairly simple, yet time consuming.

One issue we ran into was outlet placement and quantity.  There was only one outlet on either side of the sink and the one by the stove was in the middle of the wall.  This would leave the oven plug exposed at all times plus the cord for the microwave.

Also it seems the outlets were all an inch or more higher then the upper cabinets would allow.  The previous owners solution was to cut down the cover plate.  Not in my house.

We moved the outlets to an acceptable height in the exposed area between the counter tops and upper cabinets.  We had to move a light switch that would soon be covered by the fridge.

For the oven and microwave we added a few outlets.  On the stud that held the original outlet we dropped the outlet down to hide behind the oven along with an outlet above the original outlet location to hide behind the microwave.  We then added an outlet on either side of the oven in the exposed area.  This would allow for appliances to be used without extension cords or massive outlet blocks.

Next we added a switch for the under cabinet lights and ran a wire to where we intend to hide the lighting converter box.  We will be installing low voltage lighting under the cabinets.  They will be controlled by one switch for all lights on both sides of the kitchen.  We need to run a wire through the attic to get to the far wall of cabinets, but its a clear run up there.

Now once the cabinets are ready, we will be able to start the installation.

By installing hardwood floors, all the doors in the house need to be raised.  With regard to the doors inside the house all this requires is shaving/cutting 3/4″ off the bottom of the doors.  Seeing as we just installed the pocket doors this was already done.

For the exterior doors this is more complicated.  The end game with or without the flooring issue, the exterior doors need to be replaced.  For now however, the back door is high enough that no modifications need to be made.

The front door needs to be modified.  The problem is that the ceiling and roof are to low.  Typically you would raise the door frame, not just cut the door.  We can’t just raise the frame because the soffits are to low and there isn’t enough room to rough out the door frame.  A contractor had a good idea about adding a peak to the roof over the door.  This would allow us to raise the door frame, but would cost much more than just a door replacement.  So that’s currently on hold.

We instead cut the door.  This then left a gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold.  This is bad because it allows cold air in and hot air out.  My Dad picked up a stair tread at home depot and fashioned a threshold add-on.  This allowed us to install this add-on over the existing threshold and bridge the gap.

The door closes without a problem or a gap now.  All that’s left is painting the threshold and the door.

I ordered my cabinets from Home Depot.  I chose the American Woodmark collection due to price.  Its not the top of the line cabinet, but it’s supposed to be of good quality and durability.  They were running a sale that provided a free sink base, 10% off, and cushion close upgrade.

The cushion close is basically their term for soft close drawers.  The cool part was they had one for the doors too.  Its an after market installable part that helps the doors close slowly.  No slamming here.  Get out your frustrations elsewhere.

I ordered a shaker door style, which is basically just a square door with a recessed slab.  It’s solid maple for the entire door, the recessed slab is not a filler piece.  I chose cognac for the stain color.

The cabinets came in in under a month.  Upon inspection of the boxes, they would appear to have no damage during delivery.  Due to the house having a low ceiling, the delivery men scratched a few spots in the ceiling while carrying the boxes in.  Luckily all the ceiling seems to need is some touchup on the paint.

We took a few cabinets out of the box to see how the construction was and to lay out the inside wall.  We selected a few cabinets to have all plywood construction in order to take more abuse seeing as they would be completely exposed on the side.  Upon further inspection I found a few spots that I am not happy with.  I plan to go through all the cabinets before making any calls so that its all taken care of at once.  I anticipate there being no problems with exchanges, but we shall see.  The clear coat on one door is extremely rough, no good.  Also a few filler pieces are warped and bowed to a point that they can’t be used.  A shelf we order for a third upper row in the sky light area has a chip in one side and a stain imperfection on the other, so i’d like something done about that too.

As I find more issues I will post them.

One thing that I found surprising was that the cabinets didn’t come with any hardware to install them.  My parents cabinets came with all the screws to attach them to the walls.  I guess this is one of the differences in the lower product line.

Also the doors are a full overlay, yet the hinge doesn’t seem to allow for it.  I will see how much of a problem this is as we install them.  Typically a full overlay door hinge would allow for the door to open within its own footprint.  In otherwords it could be flush up against a wall and not rub the edge while opening.  These hinges don’t allow for that, hence the filler pieces.

I will be installing 2.25 inch wood planks of 3/4 inch red oak hard wood floors with a butterscotch finish.  We bought 460 sqft. of Bruce’s hardwood flooring from Lowes.

I bought a flooring nailer online instead of renting one.  This project on our timeline is taking well over a week and rental prices would have been to expensive at that point.

There was a decent dip in the floor in the kitchen so we bought some flooring compound, 2 50lb buckets of it.  Its similar to cement, but claims to be compatible with our installation requirements.

We cleaned the area and painted on the primer.  2 hours later we laid down the compound.  It says its self-leveling, good joke.  After spreading it out and leveling to the best of our abilities we left if to dry overnight.

Once the compound was dry we rolled tar paper over the subfloor and stapled it down with a small overlap.

My dad measured out the floor and chalked the lines for the first few boards.  If the initial boards aren’t laid right, the entire floor will be wrong.  It will start curving around the room and will be extremely noticeable.  He screwed down a support brace for the first board and then nailed in the board from one end of the wall to the other.

With the first board down, we just lined up and nailed the rest up to the following wall.  We started the flooring in the center of the room to make sure the straightest line was the most visible.  This also helps seeing as we needed the kitchen area done first, so starting at the front door would take longer.

We got the kitchen area done along with more than half the living room.  We laid plywood down where the cabinets would actually sit instead of the hardwood.  This was a cost cutting feature.  A sheet of plywood costs $20, the sqft needed to cover the same area, $160.  Who’s gonna know once the cabinets are down.

We can’t complete the entire living room because the door needed to be either raised or have the bottom cut to allow for enough clearance of the new floor height.

The bedroom is currently full of all my stuff, so we can’t really get in there to put the floor down yet.  The mudroom requires a stairnose piece which is currently backorder, lucky me.  We need the stairnose in order to measure properly in the mudroom, so thats on hold as well.

Surprisingly the instructions for the flooring state that the use of wood filler, color pencil, and stain is considered standard practice during installation.  In other words they are shipping you partially defective products, but thats ok.  The cabinets came with the same BS statement.  Freakin fine print.  This is why its common practice to buy atleast 20% more flooring than required to assume for waste and defective planks.  Some were so bowed that we had to cut them down to get any use out of them.

To speed in completion, we cut the front door down and reinstalled a door sweep.  We also modified the door sweep on the back door.  This allowed us to finish the entire floor.  I bough a flush stairnose online and we installed that in the mudroom and the line up was near perfect, better than expected.

The flooring is now fully installed and we had 3 boxes left over.  Returned them to lowes and got refunded the full credit.  I was 2 weeks early on the 90 day return policy.

We are fashioning trim pieces from the faulty boards to cover the gaps by the doors.  there should be a 1/4 inch gap on all walls.  We are also testing wood fillers and stains to fill the visible nail holes made when the floor stapler didn’t have enough room.

The final touches will be the molding.  150 some odd linear feet of it.  Lots to paint, lots to install.