Kitchen Assemblage Day 21

Busy day today. As usual, a lot of time was spent planning each move but I like to think that's increased the quality of the finish. So on the good old cost-quality-time triangle we're definitely skewed over to one side.

So prior to Dad bringing his actual carpentry skills to the party, I got busy fitting the door handles.

The plan was to use the replaced damaged door as a template. So drill some holes in it and use that to position all the handles consistently.

Oh how hopelessly optimistic I was.

On a test run I soon realised a couple of issues...

1) the ends of each handle were not consistently located or even in line with each other.

2) the holes in the ends of each handle were not consistently positioned

3) the angle that the holes were drilled through the handle were not straight or consistent 

Or, put another way, every single hole on every single handle needed to be custom positioned and drilled at a custom angle. FFS

In fairness, the angle of the screw mentioned in point 3 may be somewhat deliberate. As you can see in the above picture, the angle of the screws makes it harder for the handle to be pulled straight off the cupboard door. Consistency between handles would have been nice though.

Anyway, after destroying two screws finding out that the holes weren't straight and that my drill bit was too thin, I was ready to put my lessons to good use and drill into a real door...

Given the built-in wonkiness of the handles I chose to line up the bottom edge with the door design and try to center the handle, pretty much just by eye.

What do we think? Just another 6 doors to go!

I got 4 handles done by the time Dad arrived. I did the other 3 as time allowed because there was a fair amount that we were doing.

Yesterday we started to fit the cornice but, if you recall, we discovered we needed to fit the side panels first but then to make fitting those easier we needed to fit the pelmet. So we continued with the pelmet.

This involved creating mitre joints; a 45 degree cut that moves a join to a corner.

And here's how it looks when fitted...

With these in place, we could finally get on with the cornice!

The cornice took some figuring out to understand how the mitre joint would work on an already angled object. The first cut was done at two angles but it turned out only one axis needed to be worried about.

Despite fatigue setting in and causing ourselves heart attacks thinking we'd cut the mitre in the wrong direction only to realise that we were holding the offcut, not the bit we actually needed. Despite this, we managed to get all the cornice pieces cut. Not affixed, just cut to measure. They now sit on top of the cabinets so they don't come to any mischief during the week.