Mike's ext'n & renovation (solar panels)

[chippy1970]

Like the idea of the sliding upper drawer Roger

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk

 

[Halo Jones]

Hi Mike,

This might seem a slightly odd question but seeing the cooker and cooker hood set up I was wondering how this works with your extraction and heat recovery system? I would have thought there was a risk of it gunging up with grease deposits over the years?

 

[Mike G]

Very good question.

If we have a cooker hood at all, it will be the recirculating type. In other words, it simply filters the air from above the cooker, hopefully drawing out most of the grease and smells, and dumps it back into the kitchen to then be dealt with by the whole house ventilation system in the normal way. That cooker-hood type thing in the drawing is a homemade canopy, within which an electric filter could be fitted at a later date. Our last kitchen worked perfectly well without a cooker hood.

 

[Rod]

Have you got a separate pantry because you don't seem to have much storage?

Rod

 

[9fingers]

Have you got a separate pantry because you don't seem to have much storage?

Rod

I was only thinking the same earlier Rod

We have the luxury of a North facing walk in pantry in our 1925 house and tend to do quite a lot of bulk buying and so storage is important for us although friends of ours seem to live from shopping bag to mouth.
Everyone to their own I guess.

Bob

 

[Mike G]

The larder was sacrificed when my wife bought one of these:

http://www.sonicdirect.co.uk/prod/D...ASSIC-DELUXE-Dual-Fuel-Cranberry--Chrome-Trim

Most of the veggies will be in the baskets, most of the dry stuff and tins etc will be in cupboards and drawers. So, not one big store cupboard, but a number of distinct locations. There will be further units up against the old house wall, once that has been renovated, and those will be floor-to-ceiling stores.....so a bit like a larder.

 

[9fingers]

When SWMBO and I set up home in 1977 we had a £10 secondhand cooker. When I installed our current kitchen in 1985, the oven and hob pair cost about £800.
When I suggested an 80 fold improvement in meal quality, my comment did not seem to hit the right note somehow. :lol:
Maybe you could see if the equivalent works for you?

Bob

 

[Mike G]

.......Maybe you could see if the equivalent works for you?.....

:lol:

I gave all my cricket equipment away when I retired. I'd need to find a box from somewhere before I even contemplated a comment like that! Thing is, we share the cooking anyway. I do most of the bread making. I'm really looking forward to having a decent oven.

 

[AndyP]

Nice oven, nice kitchen and of course a nice house will soon surround it.

However, I will never go back to bending over in order to get things in and out of an oven.

 

[Rod]

Going back to the plaster Mike, will you be using Distemper to continue the "authentic" look or using modern emulsions?

Rod

 

[Mike G]

..... I will never go back to bending over in order to get things in and out of an oven.

That was our dilemma. We went back and forward on that subject for months. If there were eye level cookers that looked retro and stylish we'd have probably gone for that.

 

[Mike G]

Going back to the plaster Mike, will you be using Distemper to continue the "authentic" look or using modern emulsions?

Rod

In the new part, no. I'll be using modern paints. In the old part, I haven't decided yet. Some of the plaster is in pretty poor order, and I have had conflicting advice as to whether it is possible to re-plaster with lime over the existing. If we can use lime, then I may well use an authentic paint. If we can't, I may well not. Note the caveats!!

 

[Rod]

Many many years ago we rented a flat in Southampton. We painted some of the rooms with emulsion to find a few weeks later that it peeled off in large patches!
Hadn't realised that it had been previously distempered.
Landlady employed a Decorator to scrape off and redo. She wasn't happy.

Rod

 

[9fingers]

My earliest recollections of my father decorating in the mid fifties was all the effort to get the distemper off the ceilings so that a "modern" paint - presumably emulsion - could be applied.

I think he found out about the problem in a magazine of the time "Practical Householder"

Bob

 

[RogerS]

Going back to the plaster Mike, will you be using Distemper to continue the "authentic" look or using modern emulsions?

Rod

In the new part, no. I'll be using modern paints. In the old part, I haven't decided yet. Some of the plaster is in pretty poor order, and I have had conflicting advice as to whether it is possible to re-plaster with lime over the existing. If we can use lime, then I may well use an authentic paint. If we can't, I may well not. Note the caveats!!

Mike, is the old part lime or lime wash? I can ask my plasterer, if you like, as he specialises in historical plastering.

You'll know all about SPAB, I'm sure.

 

[Mike G]

It's gert thick dollops of lime and horsehair plaster.

I've just asked my plasterer, and it was he who said that it is extremely difficult to get a second coat of lime plaster to stick, especially to a ceiling. He now does all his lime plastering (onto laths) in one coat, which he reckons is what they must have done originally. So my dilemma is to I plasterboard over the dodgy ceiling (s) and use a modern plaster, do I accept the status quo, or do I try to get a second coat to stick? (OK, that would be a trilemma). Not sure yet........

Or it could be that your guy might not be as experienced as mine in using lime in all sorts of Listed Buildings all over the place. I'll ask him next time I see him.

 

[Mike G]

How to make meal of a simple job.

Firstly, you forget to do it when it's easy......like when there are no bricks in the way. Then it would have been two short holes. Instead, you are left with this situation:



The wires need to come from the top of the top plate out of a hole at the position marked by the cross. So, a total of about 400mm or 16". My solution....







All went well at first. But then:



Suddenly the resistance dropped to zero. The weld had broken, leaving the spade bit stuck well up inside the oak post. Cue mutterings, pacing, and rather a lot of head scratching. Eventually:



The pieces on either side of the post acted as guides for the base of my smaller router, and with a straight cutter I (carefully!) cut down to the level of the end of the spade bit, and then dug the end clear with a small chisel:



After retrieving the spade bit with some pointy nosed pliers and a hammer (and of course giving myself a nice blood blister in the process), I cleaned up and deepened the channel. Then, back to the welder, turned the power up and the feed rate down, and had another go at doing the join. I only needed to drill about 250mm (10") this time, and it worked:



Square up the ends, then pull the wires through:



Next job was to grain-match some oak. I searched my scrap box and came up with a reasonable match, which I cut to length and width, then planed to a wedged profile to get a tight fit:



Whacked it in with some polyurethane glue (which I have found gives you the best chance on unseasoned timber):



And then finally sanded and scraped it down flush (before tacking the ceiling):



Pity I didn't take as much care with the colour as I did with the grain matching. It stands out somewhat, and as it will be just above the TV, it will remind me every time I sit in front of the television for the rest of my life that I am a bumbling incompetent buffoon. Fortunately it should be at least partially hidden by the light fitting, so that visitors won't immediately think that I'm incompetent.

And that, ladies and gents, is how to make a mountain out of a molehill in a single morning.

 

[DaveL]

Mike,

You really must learn to ask for a little help, I could of lent you this:

Yes that's a 300 mm extension for wood bits, with no welding required.

 

[Mike G]

Naaaah, that would never do, Dave.



It's straight! :lol:

It was a bit of a last minute decision to do the job. I woke up without a real plan, and with no enthusiasm, so thought I would tackle something quick and easy. Yeah...........that worked out well....

 

[TrimTheKing]

Yay, He's not infallible!!! :eusa-dance:

Only kidding Mike, I can imagine that's a massive bugbear now as it would be for me. :evil:

Hopefully as the oak ages it will start to blend in, which in theory shouldn't take too long I wouldn't think, couple of years maybe…

Cheers
Mark

 

[chataigner]

Very annoying !
Put a similar insert in each of the other posts and make a feature of it ?

 

[chataigner]

When SWMBO and I set up home in 1977 we had a £10 secondhand cooker. When I installed our current kitchen in 1985, the oven and hob pair cost about £800.
When I suggested an 80 fold improvement in meal quality, my comment did not seem to hit the right note somehow. :lol:
Maybe you could see if the equivalent works for you?

Bob

I once tried a similar line of reasoning in relation to a fancy sewing machine. The response was OK - provided we apply the same logic to woodworking tool upgrades...
I didnt mention it again.

 

[AndyP]

I wish I was a bumbling incompetent buffoon just like you.

 

[the bear]

Hi Mike

Quick Q, as autumn is upon us (meteorologically speaking), when are you planning to tile the roof? Its felt like monsoon where I am for the last few weeks and I'd be reluctant to advance much more towards the winter if I had a choice (despite it being August last week). Your roof looks ready to be tiled?

Mark

 

[Mike G]

The tiles should arrive any day, Mark. At the moment I am focused on getting the inside ready to move into ASAP. but increasingly, it is out of my hands. I can't work in there today, for instance, because the plasterer and the plumbers are all over the place, and I can't go in without being in people's way. I have started the kitchen, but any good spell of weather in the next 2 or 3 weeks will see me on the roof getting the tiles on in readiness for the winter.

 

[the bear]

Then I shall look forward to seeing it relatively soon.

Mark

 

[RogerS]

I might have missed it but wondered why you decided to get a plumber in rather than DIY ?

 

[Mike G]

I'll show you a photo tomorrow, Roger, that will render your question superfluous. But the general point is that I am having a pressurised system, and these need installing and certificating by a registered installer. I can do bits and pieces of plumbing, of course, but a whole house is something of a test, particularly when there are two phases to the project.

 

[Mike G]

I've been a bit in the way the last few days with a plasterer working, and 2, sometimes three plumbers on site. So I decided to retreat to my workshop and get going with the kitchen. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to finally be working with some planed timber.

I thought I would start with the island unit. You'll find the drawings a few posts back, but being L shaped and 2 tiered, this isn't a straight forward thing to make. I thought I was doing OK until I made one of the pieces a third time! Anyway, the easy bit was to cut some legs to length, and glue them together where they are at corners. They are essentially ex 3"x1" . I quickly realised that the principle difficulty with this construction was going to be keeping everything in order and organised:



This is the lower frame laid out prior to cutting mitres on the corners:



There are 3 levels of frame: lower, lower worktop, and upper worktop, and they are all different:



I am using some old recycled timber I've had for a while where I can, hence the different colour. Don't forget, this is being painted. I had to rebate the inner top edge of the lower frame to inset some 9mm ply. It's absolutely gorgeous birch ply, flat as a pancake. Well........it was bought as 9mm, anyway:



Some of you haven't seen my bigger router table in action. Here it is raised, for changing the cutter. It hinges off the front edge of my radial arm saw bench:



This is the raising mechanism swung into place to allow height adjustment. The table is then lowered, and the extractor hose attached:





When I'd finished the rebates, I folded the table away, but it is still set at the right depth in case I need to do any more:



Next, my smaller router and my old, old router table, to do some slots in the mitre end-grain to take floating tongues:





The only ply I could find of the right size to make the tongues was some high quality oak-faced stuff! How annoying:



Time to glue things together. I cut some ply triangles from scrap, because there is no way you'd ever hold all this lot properly with cramps. 6mm (1/4") ply stapled easily in place into the rebate, where the holes won't be seen:



I was about to glue the mid-level frame, but stopped and thought first.......and decided that I couldn't. I have some solid panels to fix to this, which need a bit of preparatory work first.

-

Some photos of what has been going on in the house. I tacked the utility ceiling the other day, and a plumber has sticking through it for an hour or two yesterday:





This is a continuation of the "services super-highway", as it seems to have become known. I will insulate this loft once all the services are finished in there. And below is the "super-highway", clearly showing why I didn't even contemplate doing the plumbing myself:





Into the airing cupboard:



Finally, some plastering. The kitchen and lounge ceilings:



These two bedroom walls were rendered first at the weekend, before being plastered on Wednesday. They're taking a hell of a time to dry:





I love the rounded-over edge to the reveal! We'll be having longer than normal curtain poles, so that the open curtains hang clear of this feature, rather than hiding it.

 

[Rob]

Reminds me of the Grand Designs episode with the woodsman (Ben someone or other) who built his house out of Chestnut. He used straw bails with chicken wire pinned as a key to the plaster but they chainsaw'd them into round at the window reveals. Looked fabulous when it was finished and if I recall his budget was £27 grand

Easily my favourite programme Kevin McCloud made.

 

[Mike G]

First job today was to make the skirting boards and the kick boards. This is actually quite an important thing, because the skirting has to go under the soffit above the kickboard in a few places, and so the moulding has to be cut-down-able at exactly the right height. After some experimentation, this is what I came up with:



The upper one is a kickboard, with a small rebate/ lip to locate it properly at exactly the right height. That lip lines up with the bottom of the moulding on the skirting, which is where it will be cut off when it returns under the unit.

I flipped the frame over, cleaned up the joints, and mounted the kickboards:



There are little returns to stop the free ends flapping about. I then fixed some blocks in place to support the lower frame (where it isn't supported on the kickboard), and to give me something to fix the skirting to:



I then located each corner post, and glued and screwed them into place, with 2 squares to keep everything true:



Then I fixed the upper frame into place, and put in the non-corner uprights:

 

[Alex161]

That's coming on very nicely. Look forward to seing more as you progress.

Alex

 

[the bear]

Mike
Your island construction intrigues me. If I were building it I think I would make a series of boxes (basically individual carcasses) and screw them together. Then I would attach face frames, plinth, end panels, legs, kick boards etc to this main sub structure. I'm struggling to see how you will divide it up internally into its different components.

This is not a critisism, having followed this thread I have no doubt it will be excellent, just funny how we all approach something in a different manner.

Mark

 

[Mike G]

Yeah, that's one way, Mark, but I am wanting to avoid MDF and contiboard entirely. So if I am to make boxes and screw them together, they'll be of ply.....which doesn't really lend itself to that. Besides, it's really expensive, so doubling up "walls" by screwing a box to a box would be costly and wasteful.

You'll probably find the more orthodox under-worktop units that I start shortly rather more straightforward.

 

[Wizard9999]

...I am wanting to avoid MDF and contiboard entirely...

Is there a particular practical reason Mike or do you just have a philosophical position on it?

Terry.

 

[Mike G]

...I am wanting to avoid MDF and contiboard entirely...

Is there a particular practical reason Mike or do you just have a philosophical position on it?

Terry.

No, it's just the look I am after, Terry. After discussion with my wife last night, there will actually be some contiboard, in the utility room. We will be re-using some of the temporary kitchen units from the existing kitchen, albeit with new face-frames and doors.

 

[martc]

I am surprised you say ply is expensive, I am doing my own kitchen at the moment using 18mm pine veneered plywood, as a comparison I make kitchens amongst other things for a living and most South African kitchens are melamine faced chipboard. The price difference between plain white melamine board and pine ply is very little.
The ply is actually cheaper than coloured melamine faced chipboard

 

[Mike G]

9mm birch ply 1220 x 2440 cost me £31.70 +VAT, amounting to £38 per sheet, or £12.80 per square metre. This is high-end ply, not low-grade sheathing ply.

 

[Mike G]

I haven't had a lot of time on this over the last couple of days.

This little detail is the one that exercised me before starting, and the reason for the plinth height being exactly as it is:







I fitted the ply bases, and left a gap under where the drawers will be so that I can screw the unit down to the floor:



This end is where the unit fits around the oak post. I have left the horizontals complete to give strength to the unit whilst it is being moved, but they'll be cut out once (nearly) in situ:



The next job was to make some of the internal panels/ divisions. They will be a simply frame around a piece of 6mm ply. First job was to run 6mm grooves along a whole lot of 2"x1", and then to the RAS to cut the shoulders:



Then to the bandsaw to cut the tenons:



After cutting the ply (much easier said than done.......it's nasty floppy twisted stuff, quite unlike the quality 9mm birch ply), then it's time to glue up. This one didn't want to go square, but co-operated in the end:





The damp patches are from wiping off the squeezed out glue.

Here is a corner detail where corner post meets top-rails. Once teh worktop is on, this won't be seen:

 

[StevieB]

Looking good Mike. I presume you are happy your kitchen floor is absolutely level given you are fitting the plinth in advance? I recently did a kitchen in my sons Scout hall - had to trim 3mm or a strip of 150mm contiboard for the plinth due to uneven floor tiles (not laid by me) - I took the contiboard home and ran it through the TS

Steve