You know all that little stuff that doesn’t get done because you ‘have more important things to do’? Well, today was time for me to start on that little stuff. I feel like I got absolutely nothing done today and, yet, I scratched quite a few things off my giant to-do list.

The biggest victory was the stupid catch for the over-fridge cabinet. I can’t even begin to calculate how much time I have spent on this thing. No matter how carefully I measured, I could never get the door and cabinet pieces to line up. Add to that having to work with my arms above my body and it has been a hard job that slowly morphed into a nightmare. This catch problem was starting to keep me up at night. It was such a small thing and yet it had completely defeated me. Tonight, I had an epiphany. I inserted the door piece into the cabinet piece and smeared it with glue. I then shut the door and pressed tightly. The result was a perfect impression of exactly where I should screw in the piece. I don’t know why it takes me so long to come up with ideas like that. 🙁

Another thing I did was finish two sides of the dishwasher cabinet. The third side, that of the library still requires some fine-tuning and thinking about.

While digging through the dregs of the scrap pile I found a small piece of solid wood that would look much nicer for the top of the kitchen-side cabinet. I used the plywood piece as a pattern, cut out the top, sanded it, and installed it from under the counter using straight brackets. I also found a piece of oak-type trim that perfectly matched my counters that I used to hide my imperfect cutting along the back of the piece. Looks MUCH better than did the plywood!

I had to do some fine-tuning of the door on the kitchen side, but now it’s done. I’m not 100% happy with it, of course, but it looks a million times better than I would have expected it would.

I also added trim to the side of the cabinet we see from the entry door. It beefs it up a bit, I think.

Finally, I spent an hour today hauling some furniture I found on Craigslist. That will be a the subject of tomorrow’s post. 😀

Floor trim notwithstanding, the kitchen, *gulp*, is done for this phase of the renos!