The cabinets are in

It was an action filled weekend. I finished staining and varathaning the doors for the front hall closet and I frosted the glass windows. I also made a trip to our local Home Hardware and picked up  trim to hold the windows in place. When we bought the doors, the windows were held in only by a few nails. It made it nice and easy to pop the windows out to work on them, but it was definitely not secure enough for daily use. I'm hoping to get the doors back up on the closet tonight, so maybe I'll have some some pictures tomorrow.

And we finished the cabinets in the basement! I haven't managed to put anything away in them yet, but they're all ready to go. On Saturday, between hockey games, Alan helped me hang the wall cabinets. With a lot of sweat (and a little swearing) we went from this

to this. It may not look like much, but those suckers are heavy. And really tricky to position without snapping the tiny little, flimsy, plastic Ikea legs into pieces.

By this point it was about 10:30, the children were still underfoot, and we'd both had enough. We decided to call it a night and get the kids to bed.

First thing Sunday morning I got back at it, and unpacked all the cabinet doors and hardware. It was no small job just to get the packaging all opened and neatly disposed of. Once we started putting the doors in place, we realized that we'd bolted the cabinets together through the holes we needed to put the door hinges in. Grrr!! I hate doing things twice.

Back out came the drill, and we moved all the bolts up or down one hole to make way for the hinges. And just to have some photographic evidence that Alan really can wield a power tool (although in our house it's usually me doing the dirty work) I snapped a shot of him in action.

It was about this point that it struck me that I had forgotten to purchase handles for the doors.

So off I trotted to Home Hardware again. Thank goodness they're only a few blocks away - I seem to end up making at least two trips there every weekend. Maybe if they weren't so close I would be more organized. Ha! Who am I trying to fool. I'd just end up wasting even more time on the same number of trips. 

Anyway, I found some handles that I like well enough. The selection was small, but I really wanted to get the cabinets all finished, and it is only a basement, after all. Besides using my treadmill or getting something from the freezer, I don't plan on being in this room at all.

So here are the after shots - the light isn't great down there, and the room is narrow so it's hard to get a good shot. The grey post at the end of the run of cabinets supports the new beam we put in on the main floor when we took out the wall separating the old living room and hallway.

The white cabinet doors really brighten things up down there, and I'm so excited to have a lot of nice, clean storage to keep all the stuff that won't fit into my kitchen. Like my big pots, all my canning supplies, and the ginormous boxes of cereal that I buy from Costco to keep my kids fed. It's scary how they can consume three big bowls of cereal every morning. I have plenty of space to store it all now!