Our story so far: After a middle-of-the-night phone call from the security company in April, Tyler threw on his clothes at our rental house and drove to the old church we were renovating to find a dozen boxes filled with cabinets stacked at the front door. And then a cop showed up.  

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I’m no policeman, but I can only imagine the officer found it strange that a bedraggled old(er) man would be loading his pickup with boxes in the middle of the night outside a church that was widely known in the village to be a construction site.

Of course, Tyler—who dressed in a hurry while still half asleep—didn’t have his wallet or ID with him.

But he proved his ownership of the church by punching in his security code and unlocking the door. He and the officer tiptoed through the church looking for the housebreaker who set off the alarm, and they found nothing. Whatever small talk Tyler made while on patrol must have assured the officer that yes, indeed, he was the owner not an interloper, and the cop made his getaway before Tyler could talk him into helping load the boxes of cabinets into the pickup.

We assume the cabinet company had hired a fly-by-night delivery company. Literally. And the delivery company thought it would be OK to leave the boxes outside the church at eleven o’clock.

In any case, these boxes of cabinets sat unopened in the rental unit for a couple of months before Tyler hauled them back to the church basement to assemble them.

Compared to sanding floors, putting together cabinets was easy work, but Tyler required all day to put together the drawers and cabinet pieces for our 132-inch bathroom vanity. In the basement, they looked black, and I initially thought we had received the wrong ones, just like with the errant kitchen cabinet. But no, in daylight, our espresso cabinets were the perfect color. (The other thought I had when I saw the assembled cabinets for the first time was, oh yeah, we need knobs for those cabinets, too. Another item to add to the to-do list.) After the countertop was installed, the upper cabinets in cream would flank the gently arched vanity mirrors on order from the glass guy.

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Tomorrow: More cabinets. For the laundry room. Wait, there’s a laundry room? See it here.