Kitchen redecoration

Week 22 – Wall of units

Now that the floor is done, I thought the kitchen could be finished pretty soon. It doesn’t seem so…
We decided to create a wall made of cabinets. Actually they are all upper cabinets because space is tight, and we’re using them as base cabinets as well – creating a streamlined wall of units.  I don’t quite understand why standard base units are always so deep – I can never find anything in them! They’re not necessary unless you want base units next to or under appliances..

We’ve created three zones within the wall – one for juicing, one for tea-making and one for snacks & display. These are just recesses made by leaving out cabinets. We’ll cover bottom, top, back and sides with a thinner birch worktop, than the one we’ll be using for the  long, main worktop.

Putting together the cabinets is easy-peesy – a couple of hours work. But then we realised that we can’t just attach them to the wall because the wall is a light partition made of timber studs covered with plasterboard. The units have to be attached to the timber frame but their attachment points, of course, do not line up with the frame. Our solution was to attach horizontal strips of ply to the studs to act as wide battens and fix the units to them.

Then we had the issue of the coving – the curved plaster between the walls and ceiling. The top cabinets would not fit – so we had to cut an inch or so off the coving. This sounds much easier said than done. The coving is made of preformed length of plaster glued to both ceiling and walls, so sawing through it creates a huge amount of dust and it fractures easily.

Then there was the problem of the boiler. I carefully designed the scheme so that a cabinet would hide the boiler – of course its control switches needed to be just an inch higher to fit into the cabinet. So it will have to be moved. This will be a fiddly and complicated task because there seem to be about fifty wires coming out of them.

At last we have running water!    We have also started to install the appliances – the dishwasher, oven, hob and the fridge.  This week we’ll plumb in the washing machine into a temporary place – until the extension is built which will accommodate a utility room.

The exchanged cooker-hood is supposed to arrive next week. They couldn’t deliver it during this month because the Italian factories are closed in August. Unbelievable! Who would have thought that we’re living in the 21st century! The cabinet doors and the birch worktop are also arriving in September.

There is still a hell of a lot of work to do. Looking at it realistically, it will need at lest two weeks of work. So hopefully the first floor will be finished by the end of September!