Meanwhile, in the kitchen...

Five trips to the DIY shop I've done this weekend, and only one of those was yesterday!

The need for supplies, tools and a cheeky McDonald's breakfast are among the reasons. You see, I have very little in the way of plumbing supplies so I needed to stock up.

I now have 6m of plastic pipe, 4m of copper pipe, an assortment of elbows, tee-connectors, valves, a u-bend and a 46cm long drill bit. Isn't that exciting? No? I didn't think so either, hence the brief diversion to clog up my arteries some more.

Saturday 

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to Saturday morning. Instead of eating breakfast, I was sat in the kitchen figuring out what stuff I needed to buy to get the sink and dishwasher plumbed in.

There were sketches and measurements and everything - you'd be impressed. I ordered the materials, wolfed down a ham and piccalilli sandwich and headed out to pick up the stuff. In another feat of planning mastery, Dad was able to pick me up just a few minutes after I'd bought everything, saving me a walk back home.

We spent the next few hours reassessing this morning's plan before we got on to getting to the wall behind the cupboard. This should have been simple but due to zero slack in the electrical cables, it wasn't. So once I'd reattached the back of the cupboard, ordered a new socket back-box and ordered some wire crimps to extend the cables, we could actually get on with marking out our cuts. 

We utilised the hole made for the pipe to the former conservatory, though we had to extract the old pipe first. This was achieved using the brute force method - i.e. forcing it through the plasterboard and into the new kitchen.

The wall was marked up...

And the position of the larger waste-pipe hole was, fortuitously, not by any of the wooden posts behind the plasterboard...

So we admired the extracted pipework and called it a day.

Sunday

First job of the day was to fetch the parts ordered the day/night before. I had to visit multiple branches of the same store in an impatience-driven hunt for stock. But I got there in the end.

Second job, once Dad had brought his plumbing supplies over (because it wouldn't be the same if we weren't using 30 year-old flux), was to assemble the mishmash of copper pipes, elbows, tees and valves into a structured bit of pipework that the sink (tap) and the dishwasher could attach to. Et voila...

I happen to think it looks rather fetching.

Moving on, we cleaned up a bit of the old pipe and used the bit that attached to the flexible pipe in our setup.

Then it was waste pipe time. At 40mm wide, these are much chunkier than the 15mm copper pipes I had been using so far.

Attaching them together is easier (no soldering, just compression joints that screw on) so the big bit was cutting a hole straight through the wall. This is where that massive drill bit came in handy. That marked the centrepoint on both sides so that I could get the big circle cutter in the right place when I cut each side of the wall separately. Tada...

Reciprocal holes were made in the back of the cupboard...

Clips were fitted to the wall to hold the copper pipe in place...

Before the cupboard was put back in position, aligning beautifully...

Nothing short of a work of art, even if I do say so myself!

And that's it for this weekend. There's plenty to do during the week though. The other side of the wall needs copper pipes cut to size, soldered together and fixed in place. The electrics need refitting to the cupboard. And I'd like to get the worktop sanded down so it at least sits in the right place. I might be asking a bit too much of myself, but the electrics need doing as a minimum.