kitchen

On Friday morning I jigsawed the hole into the bottom of the cabinet and sealed / screwed the extractor fan into place. On Friday evening I hung the cupboard and fitted the side panel and doors. The hole for the extractor pipe almost exactly lines up with the smaller hole Frank put in the ceiling when he fell through.

Of course this means yet another hole in the outside wall, for the extractor pipe (I’m using 120mm sewerage pipe, I have two thirds of a length left over).

I hid the front two screws for the side panel under the door hinges, and I used the bottom adjustable shelf holes for the two back screws, which means the shelves can’t go at their lowest setting (actually, once the glue has dried, I can remove the two screws at the back, the panel won’t go anywhere).

The wall is… not so straight. But that’s a reality that one has to deal with. This house is actually more square than most.

Frank fitted a ceiling to our bathroom. He also fixed the cornices — this is nice, but premature. One should actually tile first, I think.

I’ll have to get a professional tiler to tile our bathroom, Frank’s not that good, and this bathroom must be… nice :-)

When I got home on Friday, the power had tripped. Asked Frank about this, he thinks he might have put a screw through the wires when fitting the cornices. I’ll have to climb up there to have a look *sigh*.

Historically, August is the month of storms and heavy rain in Cape Town. Any rain or storms in June or July is traditionally shrugged off with “August is still coming”.

This year, we had some serious weather in July. If August is indeed worse than July, I shall have to start building an ark.

On the other hand, our lime tree thinks it’s spring (photo using my Samsung S630, which is a handy sub R1k camera. Tanya’s FZ-20 would have done a much better job).

One kitchen cupboard, installed, with side panel and door.

The Lansdowne Boards kit cupboards come with trick pin & cam hardware to hold the thing together without screw heads on the outside. But if you assemble the cupboards like this, with foil panels on the outside, the job would actually be neater without the custom hardware.

Oh, and the eagle-eyed among you will notice four screws in the middle of the panel. Freaked Frank out too. Relax, the next cupboard (visible in bottom left corned, with extractor fan in bottom) will cover those screws. Only the bottom quarter of the panel will be visible.

The kitchen in kit form, that is.

Good news is I found the shelves for the microwave unit, the ones I thought were missing. I also figured out how the drawers are supposed to be assembled.

Bad news is, they supplied the units that go in front of the kitchen window at the standard 720mm height (for a 900mm counter) instead of 820mm. The doors and panels are right, though. (Edit : the panels next to the dishwasher are 100mm to short too).

More bad news is, they didn’t supply the units that go under the sink, at all. They did supply the doors though.

And while they supplied the correct number (24) of doors, one is the wrong size.

And the corner cupboard front edge is not edged (covered in melamine) but I’m apparently supposed to do that myself. Met mamma se strykyster. Ek gaan gemoer raak, ek voel dit in my water. Not that they supplied the edging, nooooo, I had to go ask.

Edit : and there’s a 200mm wide unit that I’m pretty sure I didn’t get either, will double check tonight.

Took me quite a few hours of cataloguing to learn the above. Fortunately I got Julian to provide me with a full list of the doors and panels, and I made notes as to which doors and panels go where.

Tip : get them to pack each unit separately. It might cost more, but the time saved should be worth it (I still have a few drilled pieces that I have no idea where they’re supposed to go).

So I have a supposedly complete set of kitchen cabinets, in flat format. And I have to make sense of it (they included some very sketchy drawings for some of the stuff but not for all).

So I started sorting out things, putting pieces of the same unit together, as far as I can tell. Now, if I had a complete set of everything, I could figure it out, but nooo. Firstly, I’m supposed to have two 300 deep wall units, for over the stove. Turns out I have four. The one extra might be intended to go above the fridge, but I took that out of the design, the other extra is a duplicate of the one over the stove. I guess if I want to stuff something up, that’s where I need to start.

Julian at Lansdowne Boards assures me I didn’t pay for the extra stuff, hy voel ‘n veer.

On the other hand, I’m supposed to have four fixed shelves for the microwave unit, and I only have two.

I also have no idea what this is, but Julian phone-IDed it as part of the drawer assembly, I will have to go there to have a look at where and how it goes.

Sunrise yesterday morning, slightly gippoed (original).

Oh, and why does it feel like Christmas? ‘cos the kids get toys which have to be assembled by Yours Truly, that’s why. Except the toys come with rudimentary instructions…

I guess I can get someone in to fit the kitchen cupboards but… that’s just… not my style.

So I’m speaking to Lansdowne Boards, they can custom-make stuff, which is what I need, because of my, let’s say, unique requirements.

For example, the zink wash basin counter must be 1m high, but only 520-ish deep. The prep counter must be 1m high too. The stove lives at a standard 900 height. And because of the stove size & location (three dominos, remember), the prep counter must be 400 deep, not the standard 600. But the dishwasher has to go at the end of the prep counter, and that’s 600 deep, so the countertop has to be stepped in some way.

So I made an appointment with the fellow at Lansdowne Boards, to CAD up the kitchen. This costs R399+VAT for the first hour, but it’s worth it if you don’t know what you’re doing, like YT.

And then I spent parts of the weekend pasting little cutout shapes representing kitchen units onto a grid representing the kitchen. Not that there’s much leeway at the moment, I’d already decided (with Colin’s help) on the basic layout, and it was more a case of deciding where the drawers were going than anything else.

So this morning 0800 we sat down and played with his computer, and I came away with these pictures, as well as the set file. Which you can pull into the free-for-evaluation Kitchendraw program to manipulate.

Now we need to decide on the colour and pattern of the kitchen doors, and what the handles look like, and I want to adjust the size of the upper cabinet slightly, and then it’s write-a-cheque time.