Millwork Begins

The bad news: it may take ages to deal with the fire sprinkler. The good news: work continues on the other side of the wall.

The fire protection company made a visit on Wednesday. The sprinkler head definitely needs to be replaced: at the point it has any paint on it, it’s no longer useful. It will also be necessary to run a new sprinkler head in the new kitchen wall, so that the relocated cooking area is directly covered by a sprinkler. On the plus side, it should be possible to conceal the sprinkler in the wall, so I won’t have any weird pipe running across the ceiling.

While I’d like to hope otherwise, the person from the fire protection company suggested it could take many weeks just to get the permit to change the fire sprinkler, let alone actually do the work. All of which does not bode well from a time or cost perspective.

The millwork on the other side of the wall has started going in, though, which is good to see. It’s weird. The cabinet boxes are both smaller and larger than I had imagined now they’re roughly in place. I’m slightly worried about the space between some of the cabinets and some circulation space. In other places, it’s not as bad as I feared it might be.

They’ve also started putting down the new flooring. It’s really pleasing to see it in place, both from the perspective of seeing progress and knowing that I’ve made a choice I like for the new material. So much of this project is a leap of faith; it’s nice when the concept is just as good when executed as it is on paper.

There’s a lot more of that to go. And the rest of the cabinets should go in soon as well. Those have been fabricated to custom sizes so that the limited space is maximized.