Four days and no new entries?!? C'mon!

Things have been slow-ish at Casa Mitch destruction central. Here's why:

Remember that plumbing leak I talked about when I removed the dishwasher? That turned out to be a pretty epic pain in the ass. It had a standard "angle stop", i.e. one of those little oval-handled faucet-like valves. Usually you can just shut 'em off, disconnect water lines, and everyone's happy. This is how it worked with the hot and cold water lines for the sink. But once I got the water line for the dishwasher removed, it kept dripping, and no amount of tightening was gonna stop it. Off to Lowe's I went to get a cap to screw on in place of the valve. Since the there was already a threaded bolt on the pipe end, I needed two parts, a dual-threaded coupler and the actual cap.

I called my Nice Plumber Guy (guys who installed the gas lines), and he told me where the master water shutoff for the house was- under a metal cover near the sidewalk. Opening this, I apparently disturbed a large festoon of baby crickets (and some not-so-baby). Sorry guys. Fortunately I was wearing gloves. This began what would be an afternoon of running back and forth, screwing some combination of stuff on, turning water back on, then watching it continue to drip while I tightened, tried it with and without plumbing tape, etc. Then I took a trip to a dedicated plumbing store where they informed me that the threads were of crap tolerance, thus impairing their ability to impede water flow. They sold me some more cap-type stuff. Back home I went. Master water off. Same thing. Drip. Drip.

Call Nice Plumber Guys™, they tell me to get an angle stop instead (i.e. the valve that was already there). By this time, it's dark, I'm totally frustrated and I'm supposed to go see my friend Richard Cheese that night, so I shove a bowl underneath, and skulk away, defeated.

To cut a long story short, much imbibing occurred Friday night, landing me with a wicked hangover Saturday, which morphed into one of my world-famous multi-day muscular tension headaches (imagine a migraine with slightly different symptoms, but equally painful and debilitating). This lasted 'til about late Sunday afternoon when I finally got it together to return to Lowe's, and swap out their crappy cap stuff for a new angle shutoff valve (and a roll of better quality plumber's tape). Returning home, I shut off the water for the what seemed like the 100th time, tightened the new valve, turned on the master water and crossed my fingers. God bless it, it no longer leaked. Victory.

As an aside, while at Lowe's, I picked up more of my favorite new light bulb. Sylvania makes some neat CFL fluorescents that are 60-watt equivalent, but only use 13 watts, and somehow have a "light temperature" like a standard bulb. In other words, they don't give off cold, blue-ish light. They're about six bucks for two, turn on instantly, and are more compact than older CFL's. Neat-o. I don't think they work with dimmers though.

Back to today (Monday), I dicked about in Ikea kitchen designer app some more trying to decide what to do about the tops of the cabs and the part of the ceilng that drops down about a foot around the perimeter of the kitchen. Sounds simple, but it rapidly gets complicated... for starters my swell built-in cab depth fridge is to be surrounded by cabs, and the whole mess is 24" deep. This is will all go either up to the ceiling, or about 10" from the ceiling depending on how I do it.

But high cabs aren't typically that deep- they're usually 12 7/8" deep. See how this gets tricky? If I don't remove the "drop" from the ceiling, its depth isn't gonna match the cabinet depth in places. And it's gets worse because my current design has shallow cabs on the wall by the window, but all the way at the left I have another tall 24" deep cab for the built-in oven and microwave. Sigh.

Ikea basically has two wall cabinet heights- 30" and 39". It would appear the shorter ones are for situations with a ceiling drop, and the tall ones are for situations where you want to go clear up to the ceiling (or real close, with a trim piece on top). This may be what I do.

This is all getting complicated :(