No News is Good News

So what have I been doing the last few days? Well after my Dordogne trip on Wednesday, I’d come home to find a note on the doorstep from my friends S & C who were down for a week with C’s brother M. As I’d been out they had invited me round for after dinner drinks, or in my case, after locking up the chickens drinks to catch up on news. It was a lovely end to a very enjoyable day.

Thursday I was out gallivanting again, this time to the Lot where another friend, SD, was holidaying and had invited me for lunch. I’d met SD on an alpaca judges training day back in the UK before I’d come out here. We had a wonderful time talking about alpacas, home schooling and generally putting the world to rights. So good that we had no idea of the time until the church bells started ringing out for 7 pm and I had to set off back in order to feed the alpacas. Before leaving though, SD let me have some of the saxifrages and sempervivums she had in her garden for me to propagate. I have a vague idea of planting a living roof sometime in the future and am going to start growing some plugs.

Friday was the day my car went to the garage to get the ABS sensor fixed. The sensor had decided to start working again on the way back from C & S’s and didn’t come on once on the trip over to SD, but I wasn’t going to risk having it fail again as you can guarantee it would fail at the most critical moment. I’d arranged for C, S & M to come over and see how the work was progressing in the kitchen and when they telephoned to confirm a time I was able to forewarn them that their help was going to be required.

As I said in the earlier post, all the screws were out between the sink and the corner unit. I spent quite a while Friday morning trying to get the corner unit out. First I found yet another screw holding the two units together but after removing that, the two were definitely independent. I tried sliding it out, nothing happened. I got a torch and looked under the unit; a waste pipe had been plumbed in round one of the legs of the corner unit and there was no way I could lift it out – a job for C & M.

To cut a long story a bit shorter, C & M couldn’t lift it either, the pipe had been put in so tightly the leg wouldn’t pass through the gap and had to be dismantled. Even so, where the electric point for the cooker and the tap for the dishwasher had been put, stopped the unit from being pulled out. Eventually they took a hammer to the side of the unit and got it off, I’d glued it but not with loads of glue, just a bit to act more like loctite.

The shelf was then put in, with required cut-out to miss the plumbing and electrics and the unit side re-assembled.

Did I panic during this; well I was a bit worried until S told me that M was a kitchen fitter by trade!

So I am now on the next bit, not progressing as fast as I thought I would. I’ve not got pre-formed work surfaces but a sort of compressed chipboard onto which I will put the tiles I’m going to use as the work surface. M suggested that 2 coats of gloss paint would be an excellent idea to protect the chipboard around the sink unit from absorbing any spilt water and then disintegrating.

After I’ve done that, I’ll do my best to squidge silicon sealant into every gap possible and then I’ll get on with cutting the worktops for the other units. It might be taking a bit of time, but I’m getting there, so many, many thanks to C, M & S, hopefully by the time you are back again I’ll have a complete kitchen to show you.