Day: June 2, 2013

I’m moving steadily forward with my kitchen, not as fast as I’d like to, but things will speed up as from now. I knew that I’d be unable to do anything much until I’d made the corner good so I could start to press ahead with getting the floor units installed, but the mortar would have to have time to cure so I could secure the cable junction boxes for the washing machine and oven and the corner unit itself. I’d hoped to get the making good done yesterday but I had a very long wait at Brico Depot to exchange two ‘facades’ (cupboard doors) that were incorrect and by the time I’d got home, it was too late to start. So that was today’s job.

I mentioned in my previous post that the angle between the walls is greater than 90 degrees, and how I’ve got around it is shown in the following pic.

The back edge of the corner unit has had to be pushed back into the wall which was not a problem after cutting away at the hump in the corner. The main problem with having an angle greater than 90 degrees is that it effectively moves the junction strip on the side of the corner unit for the unit that butts up against it and which should be at 90 degrees to it, away from the wall that the latter should be up against. So the adjoining 40cm and 60cm units will be standing a few centimetres off the wall that they should be up tight against. I’ve calculated that this will not be too serious though, because although the units along the main wall will have a worktop 60cm in depth the units standing away from the wall will just need a worktop of depth 63cm and an infill panel at the end to fill the gap. So no problem 🙂

Here’s how the kitchen corner looked after I’d made it good using plain mortar. It was a bit fiddly because of the limited space that there was to work in and the hanging cables and junction boxes that kept getting in the way, but I’m happy with it.

I’ve decided not to bury the electric cable tubes again because there’s no need to. They’ll be behind the corner unit and the corner will be boxed in above the worktop in any case. So all I’ll do when I re-secure the electrical junction boxes is make up a plywood cover for the tubes, which I’ll fix to the wall with screws. Anybody in the future who then rips the kitchen out (hopefully long after I’m gone!) will then not have the problem I was faced with and know immediately that the cables are there.

I can’t do much more today. I pushed the corner unit into position before the mortar cures so I know it will fit properly. Now I’ll just put together another couple of floor units after I’ve had another cup of tea and hopefully I’ll be able to make much quicker progress tomorrow and in the days to come.

By the way – although this weekend’s weather was generally pretty good, I don’t think that I missed much of an opportunity to fly through working indoors on the kitchen and not being able to get out to Castillonnes. The reason was the northerly winds that we’re still being plagued with, which I think would probably have been a bit too strong and gusting for microlights. I hope to ‘break the back’ of the kitchen work this week, during which temperatures could get to over 30 degrees Celsius, and then be able to get some flying in next weekend. However, at the time of writing, it already looks as though this plan could be de-railed because as so often with the high temperatures, we could end up with thunderstorms by, yes you’ve guessed it, Saturday and Sunday 😐