Rehabber’s Rehab

Its Christmas time and the family is in town, what else is there to do but work.

Our cabinets arrived December 23 filling the garage with boxes big and small. Liz and I came back from Indiana the day after Christmas because I was on call and Liz had to work. If work was slow and I didn’t have get called in I would be able to help Matt and Dad install the cabinets.

I spent Friday doing a massive cleanup project, reclaiming our home from the dust for the living. I did laundry for the first time in our new house with our new washer and dryer that arrived a couple of weeks earlier. I mopped three times and still could not see the rich red of our living room floors, but the dust was slowly disappearing. I’m sure your socks and feet will still get dirty walking around the house, but at least now its not being tracked from one room to the next. After cleaning, Liz came home and grouted some holes in the bath tub tile and I painted the ceiling and kitchen walls white so that we could install cabinets without having to later paint the area. I survived the day without being called in to work.

Early Saturday (7AM), Dad and Matt arrived from Indiana and we started installing the cabinets. Its always slow going at first as you need to establish the high point of the kitchen floor so that all the other cabinets can be set level by shimming them up to that highest point. But the Martin boys were firing on all cylinders and managed to get all the base cabinets in and some of the wall cabinets including the difficult built in refrigerator cabinet before break time.

Our Aunt Lynne and Owen were still in town and Liz’s birthday was the next day so we decided to have our traditional family dinner with Liz’s family at a popular gourmet Mexican restaurant in Oak Park- the New Rebozo. We had a lot of fun with the two families, Uncle Bruce visiting from Texas and a fair amount of Margharita’s. You could tell Liz had a lot of fun with everybody she loves together.

The third day started a little bit later and I knew that I just would not be lucky enough to not get called in for a third day straight to work, but Dad and I got to putting together the wall cabinets having learned a lesson that we could attach a manageble bank of wall cabinets together on the floor and then hang them together on the wall. This proved helpful and allowed us to move on to the bathroom cabinets pretty quickly.

When Matt arrived we threw up the last of the wall cabinets and then brought in the monstrous 8ft high bathroom built in cabinet through a complex manuever via the front door. I finally got called in to work just as we were sitting down to a late lunch. When I got back I helped Dad and Matt muscle in the built-in in a tight fit in the bathroom and admired there completed work in the kitchen.

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