Pure frustration

It’s been a very long day today. I was up at about 5.30 am after a fitful night’s sleep disturbed by a thunderstorm and took the opportunity to deal with a boring but essential sanitary function that nevertheless has to be done on a regular basis. I’ll say no more. Then after a clean and tidy up and a leisurely breakfast I decided to make an early trip to Leroy Merlin to buy some more stuff that I need for the kitchen installation.

That included some more plumbing items and also a high quality, fine cut circular saw blade. I bought a Bosch one that was quite expensive but when I tried it out after returning home it proved to be exactly what I wanted. After a couple of experiments I confirmed that by cutting a worktop from the underside it was possible to get a perfectly clean cut with no damage at all to the worktop surface.

But there was still a problem. When my circular saw was new and I’d used it for the installation of my friend Val’s kitchen I didn’t have to worry about the worktop cuts that I’d made. Every cut was clean and just as importantly, perfectly vertical. Since then I’ve used the saw for various jobs and also loaned it to someone who used it for a heavy job and now things were different.

Although the new Bosch blade was giving me a nice, clean cut it certainly wasn’t vertical and when doing thick cuts, like for worktops, it’s absolutely essential that it is. And even more so when you want to glue join two cut edges, as I do to accommodate the angle between my kitchen walls. Luckily I had enough spare worktop in order to cut overlong lengths for each worktop segment, checking the cut and then making adjustments to the saw and cutting again. But it took literally hours, and I mean hours, of frustration making cut after cut before I got anything approaching cuts that were vertical.

But get there I did and I got everything cut and ready to fix except for the cut angle.

The walls and floor of the kitchen are so true that I can do all of this work without the cabinets having to be permanently and rigidly installed.

On each side of the kitchen there’s a right angle join. The next shot shows how I’ll do them, based on an idea I got from looking at a kitchen display at Brico Depot. I think it looks very neat and tidy – much better than the awful big joints that I had in my old kitchen at Plazac which were unhygienic dirt traps.

I’m not sure yet whether to use the same type of strip to cover the worktop cut ends, as below, or to use the usual stick-on edge tape.

That just leaves the angle cuts to do which will be the first job tomorrow after I’ve picked up the dishwasher from Conforama. For the time being I’ve just roughly marked out where the cuts will be made on the two segments of worktop by placing one on top of the other and marking where the outside of the joint will be on each one.

By then marking each sheet where they overlap at the corner of the angle and joining the ends of the line on each one, voilà, there’s where you make your cuts.

You need to be very careful and accurate, which is why I left it for tomorrow. By around 7.00 pm when I called it a day I was much too tired to do such job. And anyway, although it was a very frustrating day, I was still pleased with the progress I managed to make 🙂

As a footnote, as I type this we’ve got a wild orange sky, thunder and storm force winds that are trying yet again to tear down my ‘tonnelles’. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that they won’t succeed as I’ve really and truly got enough on my plate at the moment.