The Curious Cabinet of Dr. Hart

If we're gonna cook and bake and make tea, we're gonna need some kitchen cabinets.

We're using the room adjoining the downstairs kitchen as our prep room / pantry. The kitchen proper has the stainless range, fridge, and freezer, while the pantry will have wooden cabinets and a butcher block countertop. I suspect we'll spend as much time in the pantry as in the kitchen. Kneading and rolling out dough, squeezing lemons, adding eye of newt, etc. before transporting everything to the oven or stove.

There's not a lot of room here, but we're able to make a nice L-shaped workspace. By regulation, we have to have sink in here for cleaning vegetables and washing our hands. Heaven forbid that we wash carrots in the same sink (sorry: three sinks) that we use to wash dishes. Nope, that requires a separate sink.

I assembled and installed the base cabinets last week; the countertops come next week. Before that, however, we had to move some of the plumbing and electrical because -- of course -- they weren't in the right place. The hot and cold water pipes were on opposite sides of the same stud, virtually guaranteeing that one or the other would be in the wrong position. Naturally, the edge of the sink cabinet fell exactly in between the two. So out comes some of the wall and in comes the plumber to move the hot water pipe a whole 12 inches to one side. We nudged the drain pipe over a bit, too, just for convenience.

And as long as we've got the wall open...

I took the opportunity to add a line of new grounded electrical outlets above the base cabinets. We'll need them for mixers, blender, counter-rotating knives, or whatever. There's a GFCI under the sink, just in case. And even a 220V outlet because, well, why not?

Because this is an outside wall, I insulated it a few years ago when we were doing so much work on the floor above. Seemed like a good idea, but now I had to remove some of that insulation to rearrange the plumbing and electrical, and then try to put it all back. Net result: a lot of foam debris and dust all over the pantry. That stuff's hard to sweep up.