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.