3/13-15/12 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

On the way, I stopped in and visited with Claude McVey. He had just returned from a doctor's visit with his son-in-law John. So I got to meet John while I was there. There was a lot of new snow and slush on the road going over the pass. The roads were clear from there to Camp Serendipity. I arrived at 2:10.

There was about 6 inches of new snow on my driveway that hadn't been cleared. I used 4wd to get in and park which I did with no trouble. Bert and Ernie were both there to greet me when I got out to turn the water pressure up. After I parked, we went up to the cabin for hugs and biscuits. I was happy to see that Chuck, the potted Sequoia tree was still standing upright. I was also happy to see that there was no evidence of mice in the cabin. Maybe there is a chance that I will get the ceiling boards installed and finally win the war before the mice launch another offensive.

I cleared the snow off the back porch and steps and then had my lunch. Afterwards, I called Terry at Marson and Marson and told him about my out-of-level floor problem. After a short discussion, he agreed with me that the best solution would be to trim the bottoms of the cabinets to fit the floor.

After we hung up, I carefully positioned and leveled the sink cabinet unit and scribed the bottom to reflect the floor contour. Then I used a hand saw to trim the bottom of the cabinet. When I put the cabinet unit back in place I was delighted that it sat perfectly square, level, and plumb, and lined up in the right position.

On Wednesday, I followed the same procedure of positioning, scribing, and trimming the bottom of the cabinet unit to the right of the sink. Then I installed the two cabinets by fastening them together and to the log wall.

Next, I installed the big vertical finished panel to the left of the refrigerator and fastened it to the cabinets to the left and to the right of it. On the left, I screwed through the panel and into the front trim board on the cabinet. On the right side, I screwed through the front cabinet trim board and into the 3/4 inch panel. The screws I used were about a half inch too long and would have come out the finished side of the panel if I hadn't shortened them. I used a vise grip and a crescent wrench to break off a half inch of the ends of two screws. Then I drilled my pilot hole so that it penetrated only a half inch of the 3/4 inch panel. Then I drove the broken-off screws in and it worked fine. I don't know how real cabinet installers do it, but what I did seems to have worked fine. The cabinets look beautiful.

After lunch and a nap, I installed the upper cabinet to the left of the refrigerator. I had to trim a small half-inch radius notch out of the upper corner of the unit to conform to the chinking around the Grid 2 loft support beam, but other than that, the unit went right up against the flattened logs and I had no problem installing it. I was very happy with how it looked.

With the cabinets in that area finally installed, I moved the refrigerator back to its intended spot, hopefully for the last time. Then I took the opportunity to clean up things that had been in the way, such as un-installed cabinets and the refrigerator. Among them was an old cabinet that I had been using for storage of odds and ends that had at times been under the stairs and for quite a while has been in the hallway. Now that the kitchen cabinets were out of the bedroom, I decided that was the place for this old cabinet.

The old cabinet had a heavy load of contents, including a 50 lb box of nails and a fairly heavy box of drywall screws. It also had an unruly load of stuff piled on the top of it. Most of it was a tangle of extension cords, trouble lights, and lamps. I coiled up all of the cords and put them in a wire basket which I stored down in the crawl space. As my need for temporary power and lighting has diminished as the building has progressed, these things had accumulated and fallen into disuse. It was time to organize them and store them out of the way.

Once the old cabinet was cleaned up and mostly offloaded, I moved it to the bedroom and replaced its contents, except for the things I moved to the crawlspace. The cabinet now serves as the telephone stand in the bedroom and is out of the way. It looks good in there and it makes a big difference being out of the way on the main floor.

On Thursday morning, I awoke to see about a foot of new snow and it was still snowing. I had talked pretty late into the night with a friend in Arizona so I slept in and didn't feel like working on cabinets right away. So I decided to work on the range hood.

I had already configured the hood for a seven-inch round duct and I had changed my mind about that. It would be better to configure it for the 3 1/4x10" rectangular duct instead. That would make the ductwork simpler and it would make for more usable space in the cabinet above the hood. I made the measurements of the cabinet to determine what sizes of ducting I need to buy.

Then I took a look at different options for wiring the hood. I had routed the wire down through the top of the cabinet, but I wasn't sure how to protect it in there and what the code says about it. There are two options for routing the wire into the hood. There is a knockout on the top and there is another one on the back of the unit. After looking at the cabinets, it looked to me like the best route would be through the 3/4" space between the cabinet and the one to the right of it. Then it looked like I could drill a half-inch hole horizontally and edgewise through the short 1x4 that is fastened under the cabinet bottom at the end to get the wire from the space to the top of the hood.

The problem was whether or not I would be able to re-route the wire now that it was already strung through the cabinet top. After a lot of tricky maneuvers, I was able to do it.

I started with an 18"x3/4" ship augur which I used to reach up into the gap between the cabinets and drill a hole through the soffit bottom so that it went through the drywall between the structural 2x4s. That was fairly easy to do.

Then I tried sticking a dowel up through that hole and seeing whether I could reach it with my hand from inside the soffit. I couldn't. The access into the soffit is the 8" diameter hole with the 6" duct right above it. I was able to twist the duct out of the way to allow me to get my hand in there because the duct is an adjustable 90º elbow. But the space between the duct and the structural soffit members didn't allow me to reach in far enough to grab the dowel.

So I fashioned a fish wire out of a loop of AWG 10 wire which I was able to insert from underneath, through the hole I had drilled, and it curved over into the soffit to the point where I could reach it.

Then I pushed the hood power wire back up and out of the hole where I had previously strung it, and fastened the end of it to the fish wire. With a little pushing, pulling, and coaxing, I was able to draw the wire down through the new hole in the soffit bottom so that it came out between the two cabinet units.

Next I drilled the half-inch horizontal hole in the cabinet bottom all the way into the gap between the cabinets. Since the wire would have to make a sharp 90º bend to go into this hole, I drilled a second hole at a 45º angle which intersected the first hole but was drilled almost exclusively into the 1/2" side of the cabinet. The trick was to not have this hole appear on the finished inside of the cabinet. It worked and did not break through on the inside.

The next trick was to get the wire to go through the holes properly. It had to first go into the 45º hole and then before it came out the bottom, it had to switch and go into the horizontal hole. After a few tries and a couple tricks, the wire was routed properly and now appears under the bottom of the cabinet near where the knockout will be on the top of the hood where it will eventually go. I was very happy to have gotten that job done. I won't have to wonder how I am going to do it any more.

I did have one moment of anxiety though after I had finished. I thought I had better check to make sure that the mounting screws that will hold up the hood don't run into the wire I had just threaded through the cabinet bottom. It was close. After getting the hood back out of its box again, and measuring carefully for where the mounting screws go, I found out that it will miss the wire by about 1/8". That's close enough for safety, but it was also close enough to make me very nervous for a while too.

Before I left, I took some pictures of the newly installed cabinets. Then I took my gear down to the truck, cleared about a foot of snow off the windshield and hood, and left for home at 1:00.