February 25th - Day 136

Absolutely nothing got done over the weekend despite my good intentions. I do have a good excuse which is the dreaded MAN-FLU! Women get this dreadful affliction but only to a minor degree and they call it "A bit of a cold." If only they knew the pain, the suffering and the debilitating effects of this virus maybe they would be a bit more sympathetic. Remember at this point that I have been married - more than once - and I know how lightly this serious condition is treated by the fairer sex.

Anyhoo, living on my own I was able to indulge in three days of feeling proper poorly and indulging myself in loads of bed-rest, DVDs and general slobbing about the house. Cool or what?

So back to the kitchen, I have shaken off the virus and have finished the grouting. Yay! Finally!

The grouting I did last week was done with a filler knife and it was painfully slow. I have been advised since then that an acrylic sponge is much more effective. I got twice as much done today in almost half the time. Thanks for the advice Brian. I wish I'd spoken to you before I wasted so much time last week.

So with the grouting finished and visits from both my sister and my mum - (It never rains around here - I bet there will be no visitors to Chez Potts for weeks now!) - I also managed to get sealant around where the tiles meet the worktops.

So that's where I am now. It's been a good progress day. All of the other silly little jobs are still outstanding but I reckon I'll get them done in the next week or so. Hopefully the weather will carry on getting better now and I'll be able to turn my attention to the garden in a couple of weeks' time, including getting rid of the rubbish that's still on the patio from the kitchen project.

I will post more photos of the finishing touches as they get done but I think that it can be safely said that I have a 99% kitchen now.

It's been an experience but now it's almost that time of year when I should start thinking about summer travels. I may be skint but I am definitely thinking about either another European Road Trip or a fly-drive trip to the US. The world awaits...

:-)

February 20th – Day 131 – It’s been a while

Okay so I haven’t spent the last 130 days working on the kitchen. I got to the point in October where I had a working kitchen and lost my motivation. So what’s been happening since then? Well obviously a lot more than just the kitchen but let’s get that out of the way for now.

I made a New Year’s resolution to get the kitchen finished. Allowing 365 days to finish off the details on a project where the vast bulk of the work had been completed was a resolution that I felt I could probably keep.

There is a bit of background that needs to be added at this point:

1. I had discovered towards the end of 2008 that I was spending at least £400 a month more than I had been earning and this had been going on for most of the year. Financial doom loomed large in my life. Why must I always be so crap with money?

2. The good ship Nortel had been carrying on with a similar financial strategy as me but on a much grander scale. The Captain at the bridge was now sailing full speed towards the siren call of the Mermaids of Bankruptcy. The share price had dropped from a historical high of $140 to a mere five cents and the thought of actually being made redundant early in 2009 was fast becoming a reality. Why must Nortel always be so crap with money?

These two facts added up to me facing the fact that I might have to sell the house for whatever the market value might have slipped to by the end of 2008, which, if you listen to Robert Peston, was likely to be about £50 and a handful of Air Miles to sweeten the deal. Now I don’t spend a lot of time watching property programmes on the telly, even if they star Sarah Beeny, but even I know that selling a house with a half finished kitchen is a lot harder than selling a house with a complete kitchen.

So with all of this preying on my mind I got busy on 3rd January with the under-cupboard lights. Half a dozen halogen bulbs in holders – how hard can that be eh? The short answer is; two days, a dozen Stanley blades, a cricked neck, mashed hammered thumb and a whole lot of swear words that even I never knew that I knew. It was as though fate had decided to punish me for my end of year procrastinations.

That experience was not enough to put me off the whole DIY thing so on the 8th of January I was “working from home” when on impulse I decided to open up the tub of tile glue and stick some above the hob. I did quite well and got all of 20 tiles on the wall. None of these tiles needed cutting so it was quite easy. I made a cheeky measurement from the worktop, drew a straight line, nailed a plank and just built what I could without cutting any tiles. Piece of cake, except my measurement was out and the bottom row of tiles would need cutting all the way along the long wall and they only just fitted between the cupboards under the extractor. Oh bugger!

Cue another period of procrastination...

It was a relatively short period of procrastination this time. It may have lasted longer if the Captain of the Good Ship Nortel hadn’t steered us straight on to the rocks. Good work Cap’n! He’s obviously worth every cent of the $1,200,000 plus benefits he will earn this year! Nortel went into Chapter 11 in the US and Canada and administration in the UK on 14th January. It was a nervous time as a contractor, really working day to day, not knowing if Pitney Bowes would pull us out of Nortel at any time. Redundancy had really come knocking on the door and selling the house was a real possibility.

I got the tile cutter out and made progress to the left of the hob all the way along the long wall, cursing that I didn’t have the foresight to position the plug sockets in line with the bottom of a row of tiles. It was an okay job, far from perfect, but I made it all the way around the window wall to complete that side of the job.

The weekend I chose the temperature was hovering just about freezing outside and the tile cutter has a water-cooled circular blade that sprays cold water in a straight line from sternum to groin. By the end of both days let’s just say it was almost cold enough to freeze the balls off of this brass monkey! It’s amazing what you can endure when you are working in a blind panic!

Following that freezing weekend I vowed not to get the tile cutter out again until temperatures were a little more “genital friendly”, but then of course, it snowed. If the rest of the country was going to come to a halt then there was no way I was going to go out there and cut tiles.

In the meantime I was forced to put the plinths on the bottom of the cupboards and board in the gap down the side of the dishwasher after finding out that one of the cats had been using under cupboards as a handy litter tray. The smell was not good and cleaning it up was both unpleasant and really awkward so once it was clean I couldn’t risk it happening again.

Finally the time came this week and I got the motivation to get going again. This week I have got the tiles all on the walls. To be honest it’s not a good job. A lot of the tiles are not even, not in terribly straight lines and not all spaced correctly. Sod it though; they are all on the walls now so it is too late to go back.

So that takes us to right now. All tiles are on and grouting has been done on about half of them. I have no plans for this weekend except to finish the fiddly bits like sanding down and filling the counter joins, the quadrant at the back of the counters, finish the grouting, re-grout the bad bits on the floor and seal it all up where the counters and cupboards meet the tiles.

This is my intention for the weekend unless any social invitations come my way – there’s a possibility of a pantomime and after-show party on Sunday. After all you don’t have to do DIY at weekends when you can work from home during the week!

Day Fifteen - Doors, Drawers and a Carousel

It was a steady progress day. The plan was to screw in the worktops, get the doors on all of the base unit cupboards, build and install the drawer unit and the carousel in the corner cupboard.

Screwing in the worktops was bloody hard work, even with the electric screwdriver – that wood is so tough! Then the sink unit door went on no problem, and that’s when I started having to think.

The adjacent door at right angles to the sink is not as wide as the aperture so I needed a filler piece so I put on the door, (after twatting my head on one of the shelves in that cupboard when putting the awkward sods in!), to see how big the gap would be. It was only about 35mm but the filler couldn’t go to the left of the door because that would stop the sink door from opening. I built out the edges for the hinges on the opposite side to get the door adjacent to the sink unit. This took me ages and I still can’t say why.

I got it nicely straight and about 1mm away from the corner and then realised that the sink door still wouldn’t open. Then the penny dropped! I should have installed the sink unit a few millimetres away from the back units to allow for the cupboard doors and it is far too late to move it now! Looking back on the paper plan I have from Ikea the filler piece looks like it is shown on the back unit but it is a bit ambiguous with the perspective and could look like either. D’OH! D’OH! D’OH!

The sink unit door will open but only if the other door is opened first. It is such a shame but it will only be a little niggle in the kitchen when I am using it properly. Let’s face it, the cleaning products go under the sink and I’m not that obsessive with the housework that I’ll use that cupboard every hour. If there is a plumbing emergency and I need to work in that cupboard in the future, which I sincerely hope not to be doing, the doors are on ingenious clips so it is a matter of a couple of seconds to remove it completely.

Unbelievably, that little bit of work had taken until past lunchtime. I was putting the drawer unit together when my mum arrived to have a look at what has been done. I’m glad she was there when putting the bottom drawer on the rails. It was a sod because it has the whole cupboard door on the front so balancing it from the top while guiding the bottom on the moving rails. The front looks like a cupboard door but there are three drawers inside. It really is very clever design and all of the drawers have dampers to softly close them the last couple of centimetres – very posh!

After that it was the corner unit on the other side of the cooker with its double doors and carousel. The carousel was designed for corner units with the diagonal front like the one on the wall above but after a bit of trick measuring I got it into a suitable place and it does still leave loads of cupboard space.

After a quick dinner, (cooked in the new oven!), I felt absolutely knackered and went to bed at nine.

I am writing this first thing in the morning on Day Sixteen. I have decided to not do any more of the little jobs in the kitchen and put everything away in the cupboards so the kitchen is ready for proper use next week when I will be back at work. I can do the plinths, the other filler pieces and make a start on the plug sockets and under cupboard lights next weekend. In the meantime everything has to be cleaned before it is put back in the kitchen thanks to the tremendous amount of dust I have created over the past fortnight so it is on with the Marigolds!

Thanks for reading the blog. I hope you have enjoyed reading it over the past two weeks. It has certainly been an experience involving the proverbial blood, sweat and tears but at the end of the fortnight I am looking back and feeling pretty chuffed with everything I have achieved. And, yes, I would do it again because I have learned so much.

I will post photos of the kitchen as I progress part-time over the next few weeks but this will be the last of the daily updates.

Day Fourteen - A sink, a hob, an oven and finally a dinner

Different day, different attitude. The shoulder was still very sore but the pain in my thumb had gone completely.

I started with a proper tidy-up and tool sorting session. After the previous day’s disasters tools had tended to get put everywhere and there was loads of cardboard, polythene and polystyrene packaging everywhere. After clearing the detritus I can see that I am definitely going to have to hire a skip when this is all done. That’ll have to be a work from home day on a Friday, (Oh no! Hee Hee!), for the delivery then fill it over a weekend.

The leaking tap turned out to be where I had bent the sink slightly with the blunted arbour so the water was not coming from the pipe but from the top of the sink and running down the pipe underneath. I was so thankful not to have to go back to Ikea and buy another tap. A cheeky squirt of silicon sealant and it leaks no more! I also got the waste pipe to get rid of the water without leaking. Voila! I finally had a sink with running hot and cold water!

The gas hob was a lot easier than the sink to secure in position, especially using the clamps that Brian left behind for me which are a lot more useful than the three-inch g-clamps that I used for the wall cabinets.

Next up was the oven which took two goes to adjust to the right height, slid in on the rails and secured with just a couple of screws. It was the moment of truth once I had made the electrical connections for the hob and oven. I reset the fuse with my heart in my mouth. No loud bangs meant that I hadn’t shorted anything but would it work?

I tried the hob first and got that really satisfying ki-ki-ki-ki from the ignition. Then I tried the oven and it all worked perfectly. Phew!

So at this point I had a sink, an oven and a hob. A home cooked dinner was on the cards!

The worktops still needed securing to each other which was a bit of a messy job. On the first one I put the wood glue in before pulling them together with the special bolts and it rained down on me while I was on my back in the cupboard tightening the bolt! Yeuch! All of the sawdust in the bottom of the cabinet then stuck to the glue making me a human collage! I stuck a strip of masking tape under the counter for the other two joins and that saved me from further sticky nastiness.

There are discrepancies in the joins and by the time they all came together there is a huge gap on the right hand wall. The tiles will take a lot of that out but it is going to need some quadrant around the base to hide it completely. The good news is that because the counters are solid wood I can sand down and fill the small discrepancies to make them almost invisible. The important thing is that they are all in place and more or less level. I decided to let the wood glue and silicon sealant set before screwing the counters down to the cupboards. This is going to be a pretty academic exercise because they certainly don’t move now that they are all joined together.

While I was doing the joins I had taken the cutlery and some crockery from the boxes in the front room and had them in the dishwasher so when I finished I would be able to cook dinner. After a quick shower I bunged a pie in the oven and waited. Home cooked dinner with veggies on a proper plate with real cutlery – Magic!

On reflection I think I’ll save the contract on my soul. I’m glad I didn’t sell it to have the old kitchen back yesterday. What a difference a day makes :-))

Tomorrow is lots of fiddly finishing jobs before I can start cleaning everything and stocking the new kitchen.

Day Thirteen - That sink-ing feeling

It is now gone nine in the evening and I know I wouldn’t dare but for two pins now I’d sell my soul to get my old kitchen back after kicking the s**t out of what is there at the moment. I have got to say at this point that I’m never given to fits of pique like this so let me tell you how it all happened...

I got back from the hire shop with a router and a new blade for Brian’s circular saw which was struggling a bit yesterday although it was only for rough cuts. I was also a bit of a thank you for giving up his time as he had. The router was a heavy duty Makita one which should make short thrift of the worktops.

Brian took over as the router expert and then asked me where the boss was. Well I was there wasn’t I? What he meant was the collar that goes at the bottom of the router blade so it slid precisely against the jig. A call to HSS Hire and they said that it should have come with one and, really helpfully, said that they would get a driver to go to their Luton store to pick one up and deliver it to the door. We decided to cut out the hole in the counter for the sink while we waited for the arrival of the crucial bit. We were only halfway through doing that when there was a bang on the garage door. He had tried the door bell but over the sound of “duelling jigsaws” it stood no chance! Unfortunately what he had brought was a collet for the blade and not the boss that we needed. He had a look at what we were trying to do and explained that HSS also hire out the jig which has a built in boss for following the contours of the cutting blade. He was really helpful and said that as we hadn’t used the tool he would refund the hire in full. Top bloke! I’d like to plug HSS Hire Shops now for all your tool hire requirements!

So that left us in the same place as last night, except it was now eleven in the morning. We decided to persevere with Brian’s router and see what we could get done. It lasted less than an hour. Can you imagine how I felt when it sputtered and died? Not only has he come all the way from the far side of Essex to help me, he was due to go to North Wales this afternoon but was going to be very late, and now my solid wood counters had knackered his router! So off we went to B&Q again but they didn’t have a suitable one, but they did have the infamous cholesterol van outside so we had a bacon burger and a cup of tea each which did hit a spot! Screwfix is just around the corner so we went there and they had just the job for £70. Back home again we made the second of the cuts on the side counters and then realised that the long counter across the back wall was too short!

When I planned the kitchen they had allowed just about two centimetres play in the back counter but the female cuts were four or five centimetres deep so that left me well short. Thankfully we had the offcut from shortest side and had to make a fillet piece. It looks really obvious now in the photo because the colour is now the same but they all need oiling and once they are joined and prepared properly it shouldn’t look significantly different. I am disappointed with Ikea though.

Brian helped me cut the rest of the counters and at my insistence made him leave, at least two hours too late, to go for his weekend away in Wales. I sincerely hope that he has a good time and that his friend who was waiting for him at home wasn’t too pissed off with him.

That left me with the cooker hob hole to cut before Colm arrived. Of course, he turned up just as I was measuring it out! Luckily for me and not him rather than me he had left one of the vital fittings on his other van so he had to go home and pick it up. This did give me the time to cut the aperture and put the counter in place before he returned. It was relatively easy for him and, bless him, he did stay to give me a hand in cutting the tap hole in the new sink.

Unfortunately the arbour bit that I bought at B&Q that said it would cut through metal just made a lot of smoke and noise but didn’t actually cut through the steel. When Colm had gone I used a metal blade on the jigsaw and this finally made the hole I needed for the tap. I did want the tap in the worktop but the pipes from the boiler in the garage run well away from the wall so it had to be in the sink itself.

With the hole successfully cut, albeit with a bit of damage to the sink made by the ineffective arbor, which will be hidden by the tap itself, it was time to fit the taps before the sink was installed to save me from having to contort to tighten everything up. That went fine except when I removed the blade from the jigsaw, forgetting that it would be incredibly hot and now have a beautiful indented burn across the pad of my right thumb. Ouch!

I then removed the worktop and laid it between two chairs to fit the sink with the taps. The instructions say that you have to put a sticky gasket around the sink edge and then fit the straps that hold it to the worktop before slotting it in. Unfortunately I speed-read the instructions and slotted the sink in before fitting the straps to find out that they can’t be added with the worktop in the way. The sticky gasket also stopped me from removing the sink to fit the straps. It is stuck fast! I am now working on the basis that if it is stuck that well then it ain’t going to move about so the straps will remain in the box.

The counter went back and after a nifty bit of plumbing the tap was working with just the waste to add. It’s a funny old fitting but luckily I had some spare joints left over from fitting the waste pipes and worked out a way to connect the sink to the pipes.

The waste trap has two blanked off entries for the overflow on either side and you have to push through the one you are going to us with a screwdriver. Easy enough? Not today! I had to have a few stabs at the blanking plate, at one point missing the fitting and sticking the screwdriver into the base of my thumb, feeling it glance of something hard inside. It may have been bone or tendon, I don’t know, but I do know that it was bloody painful and I now have a perfect cross-head gouge in my right thumb! Dramas aside the rest of the waste was relatively easy and I got it all connected ready to test.

It leaked!

There was water coming from the bottom of the waste as it joined the waste pipes and a leak from the cold water supply as it met the tap. It looks as though the tap is knackered because I have over-tightened the cold supply pipe.

So at the end of the day I don’t have a sink, or a cooker, or a hob. I do have counters that don’t seem to fit and I have to go to Ikea in the morning to buy a new tap. I have spent well over £100 just to cut the worktops which would have been about the same amount to get a professional company to come in to do them, my right thumb has been burnt and stabbed and I’ve pulled something in my right shoulder.

Not willing or able to cook and sick of takeaway food, I am going to have a couple of Stellas, a long shower and a good night’s sleep. Hopefully things will be better in the morning...

Day Twelve - Dodgy ravioli and a knackered router

Disappointingly only one of my friends could come over to help and then he woke up with a bad case of food poisoning and was dubious whether he would make it at all. Brian did manage to get here all the way from Canvey Island in the afternoon.

While I waited I finished the wall cabinets with all of the doors and shelves and got the drawer at the bottom of the oven unit installed. I love the drawer! It has got a three stage runner so it sticks ever so slightly when closed, smoothly opens and is damped when closing so for the last inch it slows right down and slowly slides back into place, all completely silently. It is well posh! Brian told me that you can get the dampers for the cupboard doors from Ikea and they definitely have gone on the wish list.

When Brian got here we went shopping to B&Q. The road was still closed so we had to go through Luton at school kicking out time which held us up. I did manage to get away with a sub-fifty pound bill for the first time since the project began, except they didn’t have the “dog-bolts” or a router blade so we had to go to Wickes who had the dog bolts but no blade. Thankfully there is a hire shop just around the corner and they did have a blade.

Back home we did a test cut on the shortest counter. The circular saw did struggle through the wood. Beech is incredibly dense hardwood. We set the jig in place and went for the first joint cut but the router was really struggling and skipped in places. You have to cut counters using a router in small bites, going deeper every time but anything more than the shallowest of cuts caused the router to stall and the smell of a suffering electrical motor was intoxicating.

I wasn’t convinced that we were going to get a good result like this so we retreated, deciding to hire a more powerful router in the morning and grab a beer instead!

Brian wasn’t on form thanks to the dodgy ravioli he cooked the night before and nursed a single can while I sat and sank a few before we went out for a curry.

As I write he is still in bed but I have arranged the hire and am going to leave him there while I go and collect the router and associated bits. Fingers crossed for the counter cutting later.

Day Eleven - Wall units and an extractor - Oh the excitement!

The day started slowly with me wondering if I would be able to get the corner wall unit in place as this one is the key to the rest of the wall units. Lifting the box out of the garage made me wonder all the more. It was okay to lift when it was in a nice compact box but fully assembled; therefore bulky and stretching across the base units to hang it on the wall would be a different story.

I built it then measured where the screws would go into the wall, determined to give it a go at least, and then went for a test-hanging. I got one of the screws into the hole on the cabinet but the other screw, which is on a plasterboard stud wall, got knocked and disappeared into the cavity. I retreated but was sure that if I could get the cupboard onto the disappearing screw hole I would be able to get it on the wall. I tried again with the fixing this time on the shelf, hung it on the secure screw and held it against the wall with my chest while inserting and tightening the cavity screw. I was shaking and sweating by the end but I did manage to get the cupboard attached to both screws enough to tighten them and secure it to the wall. It did take a few goes of undoing and redoing the fixings to get it level but the walls aren’t at right angles so it stuck out a fair bit on the fridge wall.

Relieved I moved on to the wall cabinet on the cooker wall which was a lot easier as it is only a thin cupboard and I could clamp it in place on the corner unit before making the holes and fixing it to the wall.

It was at this stage that I thought that I would like to see the cupboard doors and shelves in place as well as the wall units because unlike the base units they would need no further work. I have got to say that I’m impressed. I like them a lot.

The narrow cupboard the other side of the corner unit went up easily enough even if it is about a centimetre further back on the wall than the corner unit because the walls aren’t at right angles. I should be able disguise that with subtle adjustment of the cupboard doors.

Moving on to the cabinet above the extractor fan and I made the unit up in record time – it is tiny compared to the others! I got that on the wall and thought I’d finish the day by installing the extractor itself. I have gone for a carbon filter rather than running ducting for a full exhaust system for reasons of cost, space and ease of installation. I got it out of the box and saw that it hangs on the wall by one of those “big hole at the bottom for the screw head to go in and then drop it onto the screw” affairs. This was all fine except that immediately above the extractor I had just installed the cabinet. D’oh! So I removed that cabinet, hung the extractor and plugged it in. All worked fine except I noticed that the hole in the back was drawing in air at the same time as the underneath so plonking the cabinet back on top would deny it the airflow. I had to cut a hole in the base of the cabinet anyway for the electric supply so then I drilled a series of holes into the base of the cabinet to give it the airflow. I now have to remember when I am putting stuff into the cupboard not to block those holes. Poor design.

I hope this will mean that I can cook fish in future without the house smelling fishy for a couple of days! The old extractor only worked when I first moved in but my dad tried to replace the filters one day and shorted the whole thing so I haven’t had an extractor since 2003. It will be nice to have a good one as the old one was just a grease trap.

One piece of bad news today was that I only one of the planned pair of friends can come over tomorrow to help. It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to the beer and curry afterwards but Brian will be here and it will be good to have another capable pair of hands to help with the worktops and the wall cabinets, which I’m sure, will take half the time with two people.

So at the end of today I have got four wall cabinets in place and the cooker extractor. I probably could have got the final three cabinets in place if I hadn’t affixed the doors and shelves but I’m glad I did because it is giving me a good idea of what the whole place will look like when it is finished and, although I say it myself, it’s going to look bloody good!

Given that tomorrow I will have company and am going to go out for beer and curry I doubt that I'll be blogging. Thursday will be blog day when I hope to report on worktops, sink, wall cupboards, oven and hob. It's a tall order, I know, but I hope to take Friday off completely. I don't mind fiddling about over the weekend but I have got to have all of these components in place by Monday when I am back at work and hopefully going shopping for fresh vegetables to cook on the new hob with something nice and home-made. Never thought I'd say it but I am getting pretty sick of takeaway food now and can't wait for some proper grub!