After some scraping and saving, and our refinancing, we’re remodeling our kitchen. Our first attempt at doing this failed when I realized — too late — that I’m not actually capable of making cabinets. By that time, we’d filled the kitchen with a bunch of poorly made and unfinished junk. Sure, there’s a sink and a fridge and stove top and an oven, but there’s one counter that’s been bare plywood for five years now, And there’s a bunch of other stuff that can never be finished because it was never built according to a plan that would ever actually work. So now we begin again.
Fortunately, there’s Ikea. The cabinets are going blue (it’s Applaud blue-grey, see page 211 of the main catalog). Some of the counters and wall treatments are going to be stainless steel purchased in sheets from Cohen Steel in Concord. Stainless comes in a variety of surface finishes, but this PDF from Euro-Inox explains them well. Custom-made stainless steel counters are ridiculously expensive. Instead, the stainless will be laid on top of plywood and masonry backer board, with an extruded aluminum edge from Outwater Plastics wrapped around it.
It’s not in the kitchen, but Sandee’s delighted we’re finally getting a laundry: the Maytag compact washer and matching dryer.
US-Mattress.com offers free delivery and better prices than the brick ‘n morter stores I’ve found. I’d feel bad about taking business away from local suppliers, but what local suppliers? It turns out that some companies offer the same product or model under different names for different retailers. Mattress Hotline offers comparison charts to help make sense of it all.