Sunday

26 April 2015

The lighting was sorted out, and white melamine edging fitted to all units. Then I started the task to cut counter tops as bases for the tiles. I had to remove the hob again to mark it off for the cut out. It turned out that the corners of the room are not exactly square, so I had to try and trim one tile on the side. Needless to say, I scrapped the tile. Next, I tried cutting the cutout for the sink, and broke a tile. Afterwards, I cut one tile to go on the side of the hob. It took me 45 minutes. When I brought the tile in to check it, I realized that I have cut a nick in the surface, about in the middle of the tile. I was quite depressed. Thankfully Petrus turned up on Friday and together (with me leaning on the tiles with my elbows to prevent it to slip) Petrus cut all of the remainder of the tiles and pieces. Luckily we have bought a few spare tiles, so we had enough to play with.

The next task will be to screw the timber bases for the counter tops to  the bases and also to remove a part pf the gib that I have already fitted to brace it from the back, otherwise the splashback tiles will not be properly secured.

There is still the edging for the tops and a large edge around the opening to the dining room. We are getting there, I reckon we could have it all finished in two to four weeks.

On Saturday we had ANZAC day, the commemoration of the Australian and New Zealand troops landing in Gallipoli in Turkey during the first world war. That was in 1915,  so there was a lot of commemoration.

19 April 2015

We picked up the tiles, and it looks swell. Petrus came to help again for a few days, and we finished the partition wall. Then we went over to the counter tops. It turned out that one of the kitchen units was wider than the others (must have been custom built) After Petrus left, I cut that unit down, and then realized that another one is too wide as well. I cut that down as well. I also realized that there is no excuse not to do the lighting, so the lamps against the wall were fitted. I have not had time to connect it to a switch yet. Hopefully Petrus will come to my rescue in the next week. We also started removing the original black edging and replacing it with white.

We had some serious rain on Saturday and measured 75 mm. Truly the beginning of winter.

12 April 2015

I do apologize for missing a week. There just was not enough progress to report on.

We have decided to do the kitchen tops with tiles. It is something we have used before with great success. We went shopping locally, but could not find anything to our taste, so we went to Hamilton. There we found 600*600 tiles to our liking. It is very expensive but in the end it will be cheaper than to do a timber top, and that would need constant maintenance. We will pick it up on Monday.

Meanwhile, I was forced to work in the garden as well, mowing lawns and trimming edges. It is looking better now and we hope, with the colder period coming, that it will not require so much work. We have received 26 mm of rain in the last week, on top of 16 mm the week before.

The kitchen had me stumped for a while. I was not happy with the remainder of the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, so I took it all down and rebuilt it. It is not finished yet, but we think we now know where we are going. I also have to line the kitchen side of the wall, which means we had to remove some of the units that has already been leveled and screwed together. We also got adjustable feet for the island unit, and fitted them. It makes adjustment so much easier.

I have not done any more work on the dining room floor. It has got two sides done about 900 mm wide for easy passage when we do the rest.



The first picture is from the inside of the kitchen, two weeks ago. 

The last two are from the dining room, showing the cut wall. We are planning to use the left over timber to extend the partition horizontally.