Kitchen & Laundry Progress
Whilst painting I was listening to Audiobooks, its quite funny as I look at certain rooms I can remember the book I was listening to at that time!
We had a nightmare with ordering the kitchen, it had all been designed using the IKEA kitchen planner, power points etc had been put in place to work with it, the extractor fan was worked out to the side of a main beam. The trouble was that IKEA would never have everything available for shipment as they did before when we have used them. Since COVID, although it was in store they were keeping it in store and not sending it to TAS. We could get bits and pieces, but not enough to build an entire kitchen and we could not take the risk that we ever would get everything we needed to complete it, so many hours of planning lost!
We decided to look at Bunnings Kaboodle kitchens and decided that was not going to work for us, the Mitre 10 ones were OK, but not quite right. There was a local kitchen company called Ezi-Fit, we got a quote from them and decided to get the kitchen from them. It is well made, but the cupboards are smaller than IKEA, I felt that some of the design choices that were slipped in do not work for me, but that is my fault, in the rush to get things ordered I did not notice some of the changes that had been made and would have queried them and made further changes had I been more vigilant. One very annoying thing is we paid for a cutlery drawer, it was not cheap yet it does not fit into any of the drawers they made which was all a bit naff! The end result looks OK, but of course the extractor fan ended up where the beam is so a few adaptations needed to occur and some power points moved.
One good thing about not going through IKEA was that it was not flat packed, I have built so many kitchen cabinets in the past that this was a luxury!
I've always wanted to use pressed tin in project and I persuaded my husband that this was the perfect product for the job and he trusted me. We were able to order it locally, it took some time to come, once we cut to the right dimensions we took it to another local company and had it powder coated to roughly match the colour of the cupboard handles. One of the final jobs was to add some wood trim to the top.
After painting the laundry we decided that we would relocate the hot water tank as it took up too much space. This was a good move but unfortunately as the tank sat outside unused for so long when it was refitted it was full of sludge so we ended up having to buy a new one!
It was a small space to work in but satisfying when it was completed. The cupboard fitted where the water tank was now hold the vacuum cleaner and ironing board. The picture below show the pressed tin being fitted before it was powder coated.