Day 1058: This is the way we paint our house

This is the way we paint our house .. slowly, room by room.

Today in Surbiton it was child labour day. There is something about putting coloured paint on a wall that excites kids - we practically had them begging to do some painting before bed tonight. Who am I to turn down voluntary labour?

So after ages and ages, we're finally going to paint the kitchen a colour other than primer. The question is what colour - never an easy task and hopefully this doesn't turn into a long, protracted Brexit-type negotiation like the first tile episode did. Which by the end of it I would have been happy to put lime green and orange paisley tiles on just to end the discussion.

Anyway loyal viewers of this blog, we have a request for you. What is your favourite colour of the paint blotches? We have some preferences ourselves but it would be great to put this out to the world for opinion. 

The samples are below - vote by number on the survey on the right of this page.

Day 514: Getting board of windows

Just realised that I posted this out of order .. Kind of like a badly edited Tanantino film. So just pretend you didn't see the result in the previous post and act surprised/in awe when you see the final result.

It took us/me a long time to decide what to do - do we tile the window sill or do we chuck down a board? As you can see from the title (or from the previous post which you didn't read) we went with the board option. 

As I found a windowboard sounds impressive. But it's really just a flat piece of wood with a rounded (bullnoze) side to it. The options are expensive hardwood or MDF. As MDF is essentially glorified cardboard and this was going to be fairly close to water and we all know what wet cardboard is like, we went with a 3rd option - a bullnozed piece of wood that I think was originally intended for furniture. The guy at B&Q suggested we give it a try and the size fit the frame. It was about half the price of the other board and 2/3 of the width - which was a bit too thick for my liking.

Now as I've read when doing my research - people typically get the window board installed while the window frame areas is being plastered so it fits in nicely. We didn't plan this one out so it's going in afterwards - less common but not unheard of ...

The wood came untreated and was knottier than a little 4 year old I know, so the first step was to put on a knotting solution. This prevents any sap in the knots from leaking through the paint and ensures a nice finish in the end. 2 coats was apparently enough. 

Next came the primer/sealer. This provides a good base for the final gloss coat. But that is a ways away. I went with Dulux for many reasons - but mostly because it was on sale at Wickes.

After the wood was primed, I cut out the notches for the end surrounds. Don't ask me why everyone does this with windows as it does seem a bit odd. Maybe window boards used to be more integrated into the frames/windows. Anyway, it was the look that we wanted so we did it.

The ends were re-rounded and a second coat of primer/undercoat went on. The boards in the background are skirting - best to take care of it all at once. But that at risk of going off on a tangent and spoiling yet another blog, I'll save that for a future post. Pretend you never saw them.

To install the windowboard, I drilled 4 holes in the base and filled them with brown wall plugs. I then put some GripFill on the base and screwed everything down. 

As a final step (for this post at least), I got out my super duty, high performance, Type-R, professional, max strength wood filler. What does this wonderful stuff do? It fill wood, but better. And yes, I do think I got done in by the packaging. It smelled super strong too.

This was used to fill in the screw holes and the bit around the edges of the window.

And there you have it. We can all be board of windows now ...

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 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 400: One hot cabinet

Today's project was to put on the boiler cabinet. Not something we wanted on display in the new kitchen. This was a tougher job than initially thought.

Unlike the other wall cabinets, the boiler one wasn't an assemble by number job. Instead, its a "here's a bunch of panels, have fun" job. Added to that, since the boiler was already in place, attaching the frame to the wall also presented a challenge.

So first, and most important was measurements, this all centered around the door, which I didn't want to cut down as I'd lose the smooth painted edges. So I had a boiler and a 600mm wide cabinet to build around.  

The first piece to go on was the outside cladding, which in this case was also structural. This piece would need to be fixed to the wall using plugs and long screws as it would hold both the frame and the cabinet door. The depth also needed to be sufficient to allow the door hinges to fit but not stick out too far to interfere with our worktop space. And finally, I wanted to mount it as high as possible to allow maximum space underneath - challenging with a sloping ceiling.

The second piece of structure was a 38mm x 63mm piece of timber to hold the cabinet to the wall on the other side. There was just enough space to right of the water pipes to allow for this bracing.

Everything had to be cut to length in my outside workshop. The key here is picking which edges were to be visible and making sure the smooth factory edges faced outwards.

Outside, inside and bottom panels now installed.

Then came the top panel and outside cladding. The top left corner had to use special corner braces as there was no other way to fix it on.

Next went the pelmet at the bottom.

A complication came with the hinges. The soft close ones were far too big to fit in the cabinet. The alternative was to mount the door on the other side, but as it was 600mm wide, you would need to be a contortionist to access the boiler and I had no clue how to get the screws in place. I elected to go with the el-cheapo non-soft close hinges - how often do you access your boiler anyway?

The little bit of plastic is a jig for finding the right spot to drill all the holes.

The added complication was the opening of the boiler control panel door - right where the hinge was supposed to go. As usual, there is a special tool for that .. hello Amazon. The tool in question is a Forstner bit - 35mm in this case - which clears out space for the hinge cup. In all, not a difficult task - just make sure not to go all the way through the cabinet or the concealed hinge won't be well concealed.

And with the door now in place.

The slightly adjusted hinge location.

Finally, on went the cornice on the top to finish things off. As could be expected, this was also not the easiest task. The combination of the sloping ceiling and sloping cornice meant that this involved lots of trial and error with a bevel (angle gauge) and Dremel with a sanding attachment. Eventually however we got there. 

I'd put this down as a more difficult task for the average do-it-yourselfer since it essentially involved building a cabinet from scratch. However, like most things, I'm sure it becomes easier with practice. Hopefully, I don't have to do it again for a little while however.

The only thing left to do here is box in the top part of the piping and build a removable front plate to cover the piping the bottom. All in future posts I'm afraid.

Day 367: The Great Peninsula

This weekend's little task was to complete the worktop on the peninsula. If you've read my previous posts on worktops, you'll know that we have a bit of a love-hate relationship going on... mostly hate.

What I don't like about them:

• They are heavy
• They are unforgiving
• Cutting is messy

But a kitchen without a worktop wouldn't get me any Brownie points. And I'd probably lose my DIY license around the house. So off I go.

The countertop was rough cut to size and scribed previously but not fastened down. I still needed a sliver of counter to go on the other side of the range. The fancy jig shown below was to keep everything straight whilst the glue was setting. In the end, it wasn't at all necessary. But still a cool setup.

Next came the edging. As the countertop had to be cut to size, there was one rough edge. This was lightly sanded down to prepare for the edging strip. The capital pine worktop has a rounded ABS edge that is impact resistant and can be sanded down to get a nice rounded edge. It is quite thick and sold in rolls, making it somewhat difficult to fix in place. 

I held it down with a straight piece of wood and clamps and applied contact adhesive to both the edging strip and the cut edge of the worktop. I should mention now that the adhesive was all green, tree hugger, save the dolphin friendly. I could probably drink the stuff. And did it work ... NO! So lesson learned, drive a Prius if you want to save the whales but make sure to use solvents if you want your countertop edging to stick.

With the edging on (finally) the countertop was ready to go back into place and fastened down.

 

And the fit was of course perfect.

Amazon to the rescue. My super solvent, hazardous, ozone and small animal killing extreme mega grip contact adhesive showed up not a minute too soon. And did it work ... YES!!!!!

Countertop's on and fastened down, edging tightly glued, drawers installed .. welcome to the Great Peninsula