Kathy's visit: Before and After

subtitle: Chicks with saws.

Okay, My very best friend Kathy came to visit this weekend. I love her for many reasons. One of them being that she'll fly across Lake Michigan just to play with my kids and hang-out with me for three days. The other is that she always lends her expert advice (and labor) on home improvement/repairs and remodeling.

On Friday, when she arrived, I was saying to her "Hey Kath, I have an idea of how I can get a bigger refrigerator into my kitchen, how much do you think it will cost me?"

And Kathy's answer was "$10 and a case of Diet Coke".

Yes, for $10 in plywood and the correct amount of caffeine, Kathy was able to remove the top cabinet above our old fridge (because, how useless is that cabinet anyways?), slide the remaining cabinetry over to the left, and re-cut the crown moulding. This will allow us to put in a new, larger fridge on the right, which we could desprately use, and which never would have fit in the old, miniscule space otherwise.

Moving the refrigerator also solves a traffic-pattern problem in my kitchen, because if someone is standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, then nobody can get in or out of the doorway to the living room.

So, props out to Kathy, already back home by noon on Monday. (mmm, when will she return to Rockford, and I wonder which project will "pop up" then?)

And now, I get to go appliance shopping! (also, I'm totally motivated to finally remove the old wallpaper border and repaint the kitchen now that there is a void where the cabinet used to be.)

p.s. - the $10 in plywood was used to level out the gap in the hardwood flooring, since they laid the hardwood around the cabinet base that we moved. We also borrowed my neighbor's compound-miter saw for cutting the angles in the crown moulding and base trim.