After look­ing at what we had and where we could go with our (big­ger than the cab­i­net guy thought) kitchen this morn­ing, Donna and I devised a plan that we thought was great. We took the 15″ waste­bas­ket base cab­i­net that we were going to return and put it on the wall where we had 15″ more room. As a bonus it was a per­fect fit to cover up the awk­ward heat­ing vent to the adja­cent room that couldn’t be moved and it placed the trash can in a sweet spot between the sink and the dish­washer. To make the top cab­i­nets match we would then need to buy an addi­tional 15″ wall unit. On the stove side we would take down the 12″ inch cab­i­net off the wall, return it, along with the 12″ base cab­i­net and replace them with 21″ cab­i­nets to fill up nearly all of the “extra” 12 inches on the that wall.

The con­trac­tor arrived and pitched his idea, buy 4 new 12″ cab­i­nets and add them to the ends on both walls of what we now had. This would work to his best advan­tage as he could fin­ish installing what we had on hand and then add the new stuff when it showed up. We shot him down for a cou­ple rea­sons, the main one was some­thing that Donna has been against from the git go, she didn’t want any­thing to the left of the stove, between it and the door. The cab­i­net guy orig­i­nally wanted to put a 9″ thing there and now here was the con­trac­tor propos­ing some­thing 12 inches wide there. Another one is that we didn’t want any more 12″ cab­i­nets, or any at all now that we’ve seen one and real­ized there isn’t much you can put it in one of them.

After the con­fab with our con­trac­tor we went over to Lowe’s in North Augusta and chat­ted with our cab­i­net guy. He was apolo­getic and we kept it civil. He ordered up the 3 new needed cab­i­nets and also ordered a no cost replace­ment for one of the ones we received where the doors didn’t look straight and wouldn’t close com­pletely. He is going to expe­dite them, so hope­fully we will get them in a week to 10 days instead of the 4 weeks the orig­i­nal order took. Now because of the con­fig­u­ra­tion changes we will get to return some of the already ordered stuff and that will cover about 60% of the cost of the three new cab­i­nets, so it is not a stag­ger­ing expenditure.

The con­trac­tor and some friends thought that we shouldn’t have to pay any­more money to make things right, but Donna and I are more prag­matic than that. Sure cab­i­net guy mis-measured, but the con­trac­tor him­self should have caught it if he had actu­ally mea­sured instead of just eye­balling the cab­i­net guy’s print outs and sign­ing off on them. Heck, I should have noticed the dif­fer­ence myself because I had mea­sured the kitchen when I drew up plans for the gran­ite peo­ple to use to quote the counter tops with. We fig­ured had the cab­i­net guy mea­sured right, or some­one noticed the dif­fer­ence in the lengths some­where along the line, we would have been spend­ing that much more on the right sized cab­i­nets any­way. The only real harm done is we will be with­out a kitchen for a cou­ple weeks longer which when all is said and done will seem like nothing.

Almost about the time we got back home from North Augusta the Emperor hit the 130,000 mile mark.