Our Cabinets Are in As Ordered! Can you be serious?

This past week, I had some time on my hands and wanted to work on making our temporary kitchen a bit more functional for me.  The material I had for the counter needed replacing and the over all organization wasn't working.  I had stopped at Restore Habitat for Humanity to see if they might have a piece of formica or other material.  I noticed in their construction area a new maple kitchen had been delivered just a few days earlier.  Many were stopping to look due to the sheer quality of the material.  It was a custom ordered set.

Greg and I have seen other hodgepodge collections and he had told me often they require more work than they are worth to make them fit your space.  Restore had done the deconstruction of this particular set, so they had taken a picture of the kitchen as it had been previously installed.

The picture of the kitchen as it was previously.  This corner with the refrigerator caught my eye!

It appeared they were a new install, but the homeowner decided to go another direction.  In examining the photo, even with my untrained eye I saw this kitchen was a "U" shape design like ours and the one side was an exact match to the layout we had just designed at a local store the week prior. If I had not observed that corner, I would not have thought twice about it.  The door style also caught my attention (something hard to do) because it was the exact door style Greg and I had decided on the week previous.

We will not have room for a separate desk, but we can use the upper cabinets here.

It is more of a framed door with modern lines and not a raised panel door.  I made a few small purchases to ease my temporary kitchen woes, and left the store thinking it's not the right time to be buying cabinets, but the memory of these cabinets worked on me.  In about an hour, I called Greg and said we may want to take a closer look.  Just the similarities I saw peaked Greg's attention. He was near his lunch hour and drove over to examine a bit closer.

Greg first inventoried the individual boxes to be sure they matched the picture of the original install. Restore did well to take photos of the kitchen before it was disassembled. Then, he measured the pieces against our design and walls.  It was nearly a perfect fit with a few extra cabinets left over for any modifications.

We will modify the double oven and stove top here!

 He only had to alter one base box two inches.  The maple color was even my initial choice for wood.  I preferred a light color, but wanted the warmth of stained wood.

THIS IS HUGE.  We are still in shock.  This home has been an amazing journey of recycled finds, but to have that in an entire kitchen is yet more amazing. Our savings over the cost of a new install was 80%.   There can be no other explanation that God is looking out for us....of this we are sure.

The difficulty in all of this awesomeness is this impacts our construction timeline.  We have little to no storage for all these cabinets, so this weekend we are NOT framing our new addition, but installing the new kitchen cabinets!  Our cabinets were not really ordered, or were they???  (Twilight Zone music fades....)

UPDATE:
The old temporary kitchen I lived with for over a year....

After several hours unloading Friday and an inability to literally walk through our living area, and a 12 hour day on Saturday installing the upper cabinets and some of the base cabinets, our kitchen was partially installed.  The stove has to be relocated and the built in's for the refrigerator completed.  In case you were wondering we are using a laminate door as our temporary counter top and yes, that's our faithful laundry sink inside of our sink cabinet.  Part of the perks of having a plumber in the family, they can hook it up any way, any how....at least we have a sink.

We still have an open area in the addition and little Charleston gnat-type creatures creep in.  Pardon the fly paper!  The life of a renovator...we take many things for granted in sealed homes.

Two weekends after our purchase, Greg has completed the cabinet install.  You can see here the space under the raised cabinet was where our stove/microwave combo is now placed.  We thought about using a stainless decorative hood, but due to constraints on space, we have opted for a vented-hood/microwave combination.  We began our search for sinks and counter tops, pricing quartz and eco materials.   Greg pre-sanded our hardwood floors around the edge of the cabinet install to make it easier for refinishing later.  Ideally, we preferred our floors finished, but timing was not our choice on these.

This final picture is our current kitchen.  We may be installing a filler panel over the refrigerator , but overall it was a reasonable fit.  Greg will be pouring some concrete counter tops samples to determine if we want to attempt to create a custom top.  Our leftover cabinets will be used in our utility/mudroom for extra storage.  

  We expect a busy fall as the weather cools and many weekend projects ahead!  Thanks for looking in on our progress.