Quite slow… but very accurate

I picked up my new dishwasher as arranged yesterday and although I wanted to go only a few kms further up the road to buy some more materials that I needed for the kitchen install I thought that a brand new dishwasher on an unlocked trailer might prove to be too big a temptation for someone. So I brought it straight home and unloaded it into the house.

That meant that I still had to go back to Périgueux to buy the stuff I needed and this is one of the main reasons why DIY jobs go so much more slowly here than back in the UK. Where I lived if I needed tools or materials I could be out and back in an hour or so. Here it takes half a day, or in my case yesterday, the whole day to pick up the dishwasher and get the items I needed.

My first port of call was Brico-Depot which is on the east side of Périgueux. I don’t know what’s happening to them because their store is becoming more disorganised every time I visit, they increasingly don’t have common items in stock and as I found yesterday, items like Contiboard are often on the racks for sale damaged. So I ended up having to go and get all of what I wanted from Leroy Merlin. The trouble is they are on the west side of Périgueux and there are lots of roadworks with roads blocked off on that side of the city at the moment and that’s where the rest of the day went.

As I mentioned previously, I’d planned for the first job of the day to be doing the angle cut in the worktop. As I’ve said several times, it’s essential for the cuts on both of the worktop sheets to be extremely accurate. They have to be vertical to get a good joint when they are glued and the cut angles on the sheets have to be complementary and also spot on so the sheets on both sides of the angle sit snugly against the wall.

I ended up adjusting my circular saw yet again because I still wasn’t happy with the verticality of the cut. I then went ahead and did the cuts on both worktops and quite honestly, after measuring, remeasuring and measuring again before cutting, things couldn’t have gone much better. Here’s the first view I had of the angled worktop on my Workmate and trestles before I checked it ‘in situ’ on top of the kitchen units.

And here’s the first view I had of it ‘in situ’. I was super pleased and also very relieved because quite honestly, the join couldn’t have been very much better.

With the pressure now off, I was then able to carry on with the next series of jobs. These included making the waste system for the dishwasher, permanently fitting the cabinet that has the dishwasher services behind it, assembling its pull out corner storage unit and making my ‘non-standard’ cabinet joiners as I can’t use the ones supplied by Brico-Depot as I don’t have the space. I made the two I need but only installed one of them before I called it a day.

From now on it’ll just be a matter of ‘knifing-and-forking’ it as the trade say ie just doing one task after another until the whole job’s done. There’s nothing really challenging left to do although I was rather concerned today by the plasterboard fixings I used, even good quality Rawlplug ones that came from the UK, tearing the plasterboard sheets and needing special care to get a good solid fixing. I think the quality of the sheeting that’s been used may have had something to do with it so I’ll have to pay special attention tomorrow.