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 396: The wee cabinet in the corner

Corners are not just for naughty children anymore - cabinets can go in there too. Children can also go in corner cabinets, but that isn't advised.

So this weekend's dilemma was how to fit a fridge and hopefully a somewhat usable cabinet space in a short span of wall. We found some rather slim, but tall 400mm cabinets that should do the trick.

First, I put in some supports onto the wall to hold the countertop.

Next came the base cabinet. This was fixed to the wall using the support and some corner brackets. A bit more stone cladding on the right side to make every thing look tidy.

A countertop was then cut using some of the leftovers from the breakfast bar. There wasn't much material remaining to use, so once again, very little room for missed cuts.The cabinet mounts were then placed on the wall with care .. and some brick dust .. cough. 

And the tall cabinet fit snugly against the wall .. completely level of course.

Now with the doors on and the wee microwave we ordered to just fit the gap. 

Next some pelmet action. Think I was spending more time by now taking photos than doing any real work ... oh well

And some more stone cladding ... I elected to do this after installing the pelmet so that I could measure the exact size needed (much better than trying to add).

And finally I closed things off with a door. Sorry bad daddy humour; builder humour unfortunately can't be printed on a PG rated website.

A little nifty work was required to finish off that small gap between the base cabinet and the wall. I put 2 pieces of cladding together at a right angle so that I could fasten it without any screws being visible from out outside. The wider edge was then screwed from the inside of the cabinet. Very nifty.

 

And the (almost) finished product. I just need to do a bit of cornice work at the top to make things look pretty. So we managed to squeeze the fridge and a somewhat useable cabinet into a very small space in the corner. More great things are planned for this cabinet, but that will be the subject of a future post... stay tuned.Just need to now find a new corner to put the naughty kids ...

Day 382: Getting stoned

With the Great Peninsula of Surbiton firmly fixed, on came the stone colour match cladding. 

This was generally pretty easy to do. Measure the gap, tape the ends and cut to length. I used my squeeze grips to hold in place and fixed with 30mm wood screws.

The back was a bit more tricky as there was a gap between the back of the cabinet and the cladding. So I had 2 options: 1) screw it on from the front and have the screws visible (the lazy way) or 2) find a way of fixing the panel from the back.Fearing that I'd risk losing my loyal following to this blog (a cast of millions) and be subject to the "your screw is showing" criticisms at home - I opted for the more challenging option. I put some wood to bridge the space and some corner brackets on the bottom. I'm sure that there is probably a much easier way to do this, but I couldn't think of one. 

So there you go, my peninsula is now stoned and looking fine. The cladding makes a huge difference to the overall look of the cabinets. And for the record, none of my screws are showing.

Day 361: When a kitchen looks like a kitchen ..

Now that the kitchen floor is down, we can really focus on getting the rest of the kitchen in place. I'm looking forward to getting my office back. It's pretty much been a box room for the last couple of months.

This weekend the target was getting a wall cabinet up and putting in the breakfast bar "island". Update: Joan has since correctly pointed out that it's really more of a peninsula as it's connected on one side.

First the cabinet. Not many pictures of this getting built as it was pretty easy to assemble on the ground. As you can tell from the snugness and the sloping ceiling - it was less easy to manipulate into place. Hence difficult to capture the moment. Believe me, lots of grunting and grown up words. But we got there eventually ..

Next came the island/breakfast bar/cabinet/peninsula thing. First thing to do was assemble the cabinets. We've got a 600mm 3 drawer unit tied to a 300mm simple cabinet. This gives the right length to get 2 stools on the other side and lots of storage space. I've done enough of these to be able to quickly bang them together. The most time consuming part was trying to balance all 8 legs.

 

After that, it was time for the countertop. I really don't enjoy countertops to be honest. You basically get one shot and if you measure/cut wrong .. that's it. Fist part was getting the supports onto the wall to hold the back side. This will provide strength and since it's the only part fixed to anything, it needed to be sturdy. No worries about this thing moving anywhere.

 

Then the cutting started. Basically a combination of circular saw with a fine blade to get the straight lines with a jigsaw to cover the fancy cuts. The garden ended up looking like a sawmill with all the random cuts I was making.

 

The challenge here was the irregular shape of the cut and the need to join the main section with the little sliver of cabinet going down the left of the range. I ended up doing a bit of an offset cut which should make the joint less obvious. Let's see. The other challenge was getting the right size of overhang. The internet is full of opinions, some I'm sure are right. Apparently the recommendation for breakfast bars goes from 6" min to 18" max. 6 is too small to get even little legs under. 18 wouldn't haver let us get by the bar, and would have looked a bit silly, and was wider than countertop allowed, and probably would have snapped anyway.

 

Needless to say, we went with a compromise .. 9". It felt about right and didn't take up too much real estate in the kitchen. And my apologies if you bang your knees or spill food on your trousers when you visit.

 

Anyway, I think we've hit the magical day when the kitchen is starts to look like ... a kitchen. I think I may just hang out in this room and forget about the rest of the house.

 

 

Day 175: Ivory or stone

We're picking a new kitchen and have started the design online. The initial results look pretty good so far. A big improvement from what we presently have in place. Just need to figure out what colour doors to go with ...  ivory or stone.

We need your advice. Please ring in your favourite on the poll button to the right