Day 460: And the survey says .....

The votes are in from the masses and an overwhelming majority of you (66%) voted for ...

WHITE TILES

So respecting the will of the people, we've elected to go with this option. "White means white!" and "We're going to make a success of it!"

I'll start with the obligatory BEFORE picture .. white walls, Scott's mediocre attempt at plastering .. boring ..

The kit involved in this weekend's project .. 

1. Mapei semi flexible tile adhesive - leftovers from the bathroom
2. 4 boxes of white metro tiles
3. A tile adhesive spreader
4. A grout float
5. 2mm wall tile spacers
6. Some "smoke" grey grouting
7. An old wood panel to keep everything on
8. And the most important tool, me

Since there was an annoying enough gap between the back of the range and the wall and the countertop and the wall - just big enough for a tile to slip down, I had to McGyver a little contraption to mount the tiles on. This involved some old wood - yes lots of that now - and a drywall corner. This fit snugly against the wall and provided a nice level base for the first row of tiles.

So on went the adhesive, spread nicely to allow the right coverage and then went on the tiles .. row by row ..

By row, by row, by row, ... [FAST FORWARD] and the first wall was finally finished. I discovered an unfortunate "bow" in the plaster ceiling at the back, but this won't be seen when grouted and covered by the range hood. End of day one ..

Day 2 (Sunday) didn't start off too well .. kids were throwing up all night with a stomach bug. Care and I weren't feeling 100% - possibly due to not sleeping, possibly due to the same bug, possibly due to too many bottles of wine at a Luke and Kathy's the night before - or possibly some combination of these. In any case, no rugby for Caitlin and a slow start to the side walls for tiles.

I manged to drag myself out of the house to pick up some edging strips from Topps Tiles. These things make the edges look nice and pretty and hide all of the sins from cut tiles. I got stainless steel ones to match the range and hood. And because stainless steel is cool. You can see the bling in the picture below.

More tiles went on row, by row, by row,, zzzzzzzz, by row, you get the picture.

Then it came to the challenging part (not really), the cutout for the range switch plate. I use a wet tile saw to make my cutouts mostly because power tools are cool and loud. In this case, cutouts are a breeze. Measure, mark and cut (and hope). But it this case  everything fit perfectly.

And the somewhat finished job .. All in all, pretty good and glad that we went with the white - the tens of thousands who voted for white made a good pick. (I'm sure the other colour would have looked nice as well)

I have to admit (it's hard to type while patting oneself on the back), tiling is actually a fairly easy thing to do once you get the hang of it. As you can probably gather, it's pretty repetitive so lots of opportunity to refine your skills. The key is having a reasonably flat / straight wall to work from. And to take your time in the more challenging parts. Measure twice , etc. 

So we're now on to grouting, but that will be the subject of another post. Finally we can get that range hood on. Looking forward to cooking bacon without setting off alarms across the street. Our neighbours will be very happy too.

Day 443: A home for our wine

So even though we had a roof over our heads, our poor wine remained homeless .. In spite of our best efforts to ensure that the wine didn't remain in this state for very long (with some help from our neighbours Michelle and Stu), we still found that there was a chronic lack of suitable housing for our wine.

It was time to take action against wine homelessness. And the solution didn't come in a bottle, but rather a flat pack box. 

So on to this weekend's project, a wine house .. a place where our wine could live out the rest of its days stored nicely among friends. 

Only one slight problem, the 7 story housing unit needed to fit in a 6 1/2 story place on (or rather under) the great peninsula. The location was perfect, almost like the developer had envisioned the layout in the first place (need to give Carolyn credit here, I was just going to cover it over). In fact it was "dead" space needed to make accommodation for the range doors.

 

So how do you fit a 7 story building into a 6 1/2 story location. Simple, you adjust the building to be a 6 1/2 story building. The penthouse could then go to the wines' associates - the glass marker, the bottle opener and the coaster family.

 

And voila, a new 6 1/2 story home....

 

And it fits like it was meant to. 

I decided to shift it over a bit to the left to keep the heads of the wine from getting knocked by little knees but not too close to the wall to make sure the skirting didn't impede wine entry and exit from the complex. 

 

Some magic then happened (or I forgot to take photos) so that everything was nicely covered in cladding. And finally, we solved the homeless problem for 6 lucky bottles of wine.

It feels good when you know your work has made a difference. I think we're in good shape so long as we can keep net wine migration to the tens of bottles ..

Day 436: Building bridges

After seeing the tiny wall cabinet and the fridge, we decided there was enough space for a hard to reach cabinet that we will never use. In it, we can put things that we'll forget about.

So, it just happens that there a bridging cabinet made just for this purpose - to bridge things. It's basically a thin cabinet flipped on it's side with a nifty upward opening door - more on that later. So the kit was ordered while we were in Canada and arrived shortly after we got back. 

 

You have to admit, it looks a bit empty atop the fridge. I did the measurements when I installed the cabinet to the left and shifted it up ever so slightly so that the bridge could fit flush.

After doing a couple of these flat packs, instructions are no longer needed. The great thing is that each cabinet is pretty much the same, just a different size.

Drilling and installing the wall brackets. Brick wall plugs and long, beefy screws. This bridge ain't fallin' down on my watch.

Everything in place and level (of course) ...

Now the cool part. Since the door opens upwards, gravity would say that it also falls downwards. Not easy when up a ladder getting things down. So the hinge kit comes with a gas lift and soft close. Instruction were needed here.

Little things impress me and this definitely did. Open the door a little and WHAM the things opens itself. Shut it and the gas lift and soft close work in harmony to self-shut. Caitlin also thought it was cool and wanted to show the nanny ... or it could be that there was some leftover Hallowe'en treats in the cabinet; but I'll go with the former ...

 From the outside ...

And finished with a little bit of cornice on the top. And the bridge is complete and I have to admit the area looks much more finished than before. And all we need to do now is think of what things we can put in there and later forget about...

Day 300-something: An inspirational letter

A great letter written by Caitlin last year when the kitchen was still in pieces ..

[ATTEMPTED TRANSLATION]

I love my dad's building. He builds very well. Sometimes I get very proud with him. [what happens the other times I wonder]

He works well for my family. Sometimes he says "don't come in this room because I am building for you; I am working very hard for you"

[but] it is taking for ages!!!! [sounds like a certain other parent who will remain nameless]

And sometimes my daddy gets very hungry and tired [and finally some sympathy] 

I love my daddy. I give him cuddles and hugs.

Love from Caitlin

PS. And I think he would really benefit from getting a new Fatmax 18v impact driver for this Father's Day. You can get online or at Argos or Homebase. [small print at the bottom of the page, hard to decipher on the photo but believe me it's there.] 

That good looking fellow with the tools is me. It is pretty obvious from the picture, but for those new to this blog or DIY, I'm probably plastering the wall / tiling / smashing something / painting / drawing on a whiteboard / drinking a martini next to an open window

Day 403: A rubbish job

Today's job was to transform the wee cabinet in the corner into the wee rubbish cabinet in the corner.

It all came in a kit that was designed for the 400mm wide cabinet that contained 2 medium sized bins. The kit was not cheap by any stretch, but at least it would be all plug-and-play .. or so I thought.

Step 1 was to remove the door and install the rail into the pre-drilled holes. Only there was no pre-drilled holes. So I had to drill them.. 

Next, I needed to install the door mounting hardware onto the door's pre-drilled holes. Only there was no pre-drilled holes so I had to make some myself once again.

But at last, I was finally able to get things all mounted and things would just be open and shut .. except the door didn't shut properly.. The kit now needed to be adjusted. 4 screws, how hard could that be ... 30 min later I finally had a door that shut properly.

Overall, I got the result that I was looking for .. a nice tucked away place to put all our rubbish and recycling, making good use of the wee cabinet in the corner. The kit was well made and works a charm now .. but it was definitely anything but plug-and-play.

So, in this case I'm happy to say that I did some rubbish work!

Day 443:Tough decisions

Another tough decision to make .. we need the help of the masses.

Once again my favourite subject, tiles. We spent what felt like years deliberating what colour to put in the bathroom. I've spent way too many weekends walking through tile shops discussing the merits of gloss/non-gloss, beveled vs straight edge, metro/square/bulletproof/glow in the dark/etc.

Now it's the kitchen. Yeah.

So we've decided once again on metro (subway) tiles. The debate is what colour scheme. On the majority of the backsplash it will be white metro tiles with a gunmetal grout. As to the backsplash behind the range (currently boring white walls in picture 1), we're deciding on whether to go with a second tone "accent" wall as shown in picture 3 or to keep it single tone like picture 2.

I've added a voting button to the left .. place your votes now.. The result will be posted in a future post.

Current boring white backsplash

One tone, all white

Two tone, a little bit of colour

Day 436: Re-energised

So after months on end of hard, grueling labour on the house, Carolyn finally let me out of the kitchen to enjoy some time off.

The family went back to Canada for Christmas, and I well, did absolutely no DIY whatsoever. Yeah. Hence the lack of updates on the blog. Sorry.

But I'm back and re-energised and ready to finish off the kitchen.

And as you can see below, I'm now stocked with Builder's Bars and Handyman Hot Sauce (to be applied on my builder breakfast of champions, a bacon roll from the local).

Stay tuned for many new posts in 2017 ...

Day 416: Tight spaces

One of the reasons that I actually enjoy doing DIY is the inherent problem solving. Especially when fixing up an old place, things don't always fit as expected and a little ingenuity is often required. Problems can be often fixed with some creativity and/or new tools in the arsenal (in other words some new DIY war stories and kit for show-and-tell)Today's story involves both....THE PROBLEM: How to mount shelving in a space that won't fit a drill or even a stubby screwdriverLong story, but what happened is that there is a pillar right in the middle of where we wanted to put the base cabinets (see previous post on the corner unit for an idea of all the aggravation this has caused). The kitchen design tool ignored this pillar and just freely placed the cabinets. I anticipated that the corner unit had to be "notched" but didn't realise that the pull-out spice rack needed also needed to be shifted. This created a gap (a problem, or an opportunity depending on the fullness of your glass).Scott's idea - cover the gap with a panel and be done with itCarolyn's idea - utilise the space as shelving for cutting boards etc.You can probably guess who's idea won .. this would otherwise have been a quick post.So I needed to mount shelves, except as the rest of the cupboards were already installed, this presented a challenge. Nothing useful would fit in the space to do the work. Taking the cabinet apart, although possible, wouldn't have been very fun (and wouldn't make a very good post either). If you really want to see what this would have worked, just navigate this site backwards.  So first the easy part, cutting the shelves. By now I've accumulated lots of excess wood. I just needed to pick out a few pieces with good edges and cut them to size. I also mounted some white paneling to the back to make everything look neat.Next came the hard part - how on earth to mount these things? For the bottom one, I cut some smaller pieces of wood to fasten from the bottom. These will be behind the plynth and won't be seen. Now the creative part. I fastened a drill bit to the chuck of my Dremel tool and used the 90 degree attachment to create a "tight space" drill. This worked a charm and using my stubby screwdriver, I managed to get the bottom shelf fastened. 

So far so good .. but for the middle shelf, even my MacGyver drill contraption wouldn't get into the space. More creativity/tools was needed.

I opted to use some shelf support clips to hold it in place. To make the holes for these clips I needed to order some crazy long (30cm) drill bits. Thanks Amazon. 

First, I drilled through the corner cabinet side and then progressed to go 1cm into the other side. I found that these drill bits can actually bend. Kind of like a small scale horizontal drill string. Using the ring in my adjustable wrench as a guide (bare hands not recommended), I positioned the inner hole exactly where I needed it.

And voila, a new home for our cutting boards! So for the average person visiting our kitchen, they will not think anything of this great feat of engineering. But for the informed Suburbiton Project reader - they will know that this isn't just an average shelf.

DIY war stories +1

New kit +1

Just need to think of what else I can do with a set of 30cm drill bits now ...