On the third day of Christmas…

…I got my oven installed. At last! And unfortunately all the things that I said could go wrong did, which is why it has taken three days.

The main problem was that the oven exceeded the standard dimensions for height and depth. That meant that the first thing that I had to do was take what little there was of a back bar in the housing unit out and replace it with something much smaller that still supported the back of the unit and kept it rigid. That allowed the oven to go back as far as it needed to, the limit being the wall. Except that before it hit that it hit the gas supply pipe that I’d made up for the hob. And even if it had cleared that, I’d made the gas pipe rise up the wall two or three centimetres from it, so even if the oven had been able to slide back further, it would still have hit that.

It might have just cleared the hob gas supply pipe if I’d been prepared to drop it lower in the housing unit, but then it would have looked stupid with no air gap below it and a huge one above. So I had no choice but to completely modify the gas supply that I’d put in for the hob as well as modifying the housing unit itself, and that was where the time went. But dogged determination paid off and I finished the job late this afternoon. It made me miss my regular ‘apero’ session with Wim this evening, but it was worth it, as the two following pictures show.

Like many similar projects, the finished job belies the amount of effort that went into it, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve now still got a few days left before close relatives arrive for Christmas so I should have time to finish off the tasks that I still have left to do, which include cutting and splitting the rest of the wood that I had delivered. That will itself take most of a day, so I hope that the weather holds. It’s forecast to but I’ll still keep my fingers crossed 😉