It is always easy to give guidance on something that you have handled or dealt with yourself… therefore I consider myself to be some sort of expert on the subject of kitchen cupboards and shelves.
We moved into a quite beautiful (but extremely old) house a couple of months ago and the house’s kitchen was (to put it mildly) the ugliest kitchen I have ever seen! I made my husband promise that once we now have some spare income available, we would acquire an entire new kitchen! So low and behold, last month we decided that the time was right and began browsing the world-wide-web for shelving and cupboard companies. We compared a number of quotes and finally discovered the perfect model at the perfect price… we were ready for action! If only we knew what we were acquiring ourselves in to!
If I’ve learned only some thing from our new kitchen exercise, it is that assumption is the trigger of quite a few headaches! In my mind it made sense that the kitchen would be fully installed and ready for action as soon as the installer leaves the house. I just assumed that all of the shelves would fit perfectly, the doors would open and close without effort and the stove and oven would be connected and ready for action… Surprise surprise!
The first rude awakening was realizing that gettingrid of the existing kitchen shelves and cupboards was not a part of the kitchen company’s duties! They were prepared to do it, but at a ridiculous price of course! Luckily one of hubby’s friends is a real handyman and he offered to take care of this for us in exchange for a couple of beers – what a bargain!
Our second hiccup occurred when we realized that the new cupboards would not be the exact same size and that we would need to eliminate some of the existing tiles and tile in other areas once the cupboards have been in place again. We were also informed that the installer’s duties ended at the shelves and cupboards and that he had nothing to do with the electricity required for the stove and oven (which had been coincidentally not at the exact same location as in the original kitchen)! Our nightmare then continued in the form of an electrician with little to no clue as to what he was doingand he ended up installing the oven plug at the wrong height (because he assumed that our eye level oven was a 2 door oven and it was not… once again, assumptions!) and making such a mess of our electricity that every appliance that we switched on tripped the electricity!
And as if that’s not more than enough to deal with, the kitchen guy made a mistake when measuring our appliances and our stove ended up too large for the new cupboards… Quite an eventful and painful experience as you can see! The moral of the story is that new shelves can do wonders for a boring kitchen, but make certain of exactly what’s included with and excluded from the installation of your new kitchen!