I got the mess cleaned up as best I could. "As best I could" involved some hard work with the dustpan and whisk broom before throwing in the towel and setting the kitchen rug from the old apartment over the rest of the disaster, the removal of all salvageable or broken items from the disaster, and the clearing off of the counters.
One ice cream tub of flour had exploded all over everything. One ice cream tub of baking soda had exploded all over everything. Almost all of the breakables (glass jars) were remarkably intact, though some had leaked into the mess. A container of hot chocolate powder had also lost its top all over.
After I was able to assess the damage, I found that out of what could have gone wrong, a lot didn't. I was able, from the position of stuff and what was broken, to reconstruct the path that the cupboards must have taken in their little trip.
It seems that the cupboards fell down front-edge-first, landing on their front edge on some of the stuff on the bar part of the kitchen counter space. That edge landed on a plastic toolbox from the dollar store containing loose hard candy, a box of ziploc bags, the very edge of the cardboard box containing the stuff from my altar, one of my very large plastic insulated mugs for water (I have two more), and a bag of chips. The plastic toolbox partially shattered, the ziploc bags squished a bit, the cardboard box dented some, the mug's hard plastic dented in to expose the layer of insulation, and the bag of chips popped open at the bottom and scattered on the countertop. The kitchen wall to the south was gouged slightly.
Then the cupboards fell over from their front edge, attempting to land doors-down on the countertop. This did not go well for them; they scraped a few things off the countertop and then hit the floor, tops down, having rotated 180° in the tumble. It wasn't a clean landing. The doors had probably already started to swing open, and there were two large plastic laundry detergent buckets on the kitchen floor. One end landed on the buckets, partially supported by the open doors; the other end landed on the floor, and the resulting torque messed things up some, popping pegs out of their glued-in holes and breaking off attached pieces of moulding.
Things fell out all over during the fall. Juice leaked out of a jar of pickles and turned bits of the flour into a gluey mess on the floor. The mug that seemed to be the only thing actually swept off the countertop (the brown crane mug that was one of Mama's not-quite-good-enough-to-sell cups) had some water in it, and that seeped into the pile of flour as well.
The entire kitchen was inaccessable. I had to carefully pull things out of the wreckage, put them in boxes, and stow them in the closet, then sweep up the flour and baking soda. I still can't open the refrigerator, but now that I've moved the laundry detergent buckets out of the way, I can reach the freezer by leaning over, and I was able to get brunch made by leaning over the wreckage to get out a bowl to cook the potstickers in the microwave.
The nice young man from American Hardwoods was just here, and he was dreadfully sorry about the disaster. He knows how very heavy those things are, and he was glad that no one was hurt, and nothing of very great actual or sentimental value was broken.
Yes, the mug was from Mama. But when you're a potter's daughter, you accept the fact that even stoneware will break, and unless the stoneware is especially of sentimental value, you don't really make much of a fuss, you just get a replacement from the other things that had their glaze run, get a bit of grog in the wrong place, have some funky markings from coming off the wheel wrong, and so on and so forth. The crane mug was lovely, but it had near unto zero sentimental value. The raven bowl has got a lot of sentimental value, just because it's the raven bowl. (There were arguments about who got to use that bowl back in the old apartment.)
Replacement of the cabinets will take about two weeks, the guy says. Right now, he's borrowing my screwdriver to get the cabinets apart (it wasn't just one, it was all three hanging cabinets) and hauling them out. The apartment managers just dropped in.
Turns out there's a gouge in the kitchen flooring as well, so that'll probably have to be replaced.
Fortunately, I had my corkboards leaning up against the kitchen wall, so the bits that were stabby and would have punched a hole in that just damaged the corkboards, and those are easily replaceable.
Everyone's feeling just dreadful about this, and this has evidently never happened before. The screws weren't even into the studs -- it was just hitting drywall for about an eighth to a quarter of an inch. So ... the installer's fault.
