Kitting out the kitchen

In the last week we've hit a couple of very big milestones, which feels great. The major concern the house inspector had was the state of the wiring, so we're spending a small fortune having the house rewired. This included moving over to using a new fuse panel. The old one should only have been handling up to 60 amps, although I'm sure it's been doing more than that. Until now the electricians have been running the power through the old panel and into the new panel. To move to the new panel, the new electrics had to be inspected* before the power company would come in and do the cut over. So the inspector was here for about 15 minutes, before making a call to the power company to get the van over. Once here, the power was down in the house for about 45 minutes before the new cables were up and running. Over all a smooth operation with no hitches. It's been a little frustrating as the power company had to delay this cut over by more than a week - the weather knocked out power for a lot of homes and they had to divert the resources to fixing that before they could come and sort us out.

The other major milestone was moving the water heater in the kitchen. It used to be in the middle of the wall next to the cooker. The kitchen units that we've bought are very low, so I've put in a stud framework to raise them off the floor. The floor itself is not flat nor level, even after sanding it so thoroughly. So this is an opportunity to provide a raised, flat surface to install our new units onto. It is also a convenient place to run the pipes through for the water heater. Whilst we were sanding the floor, we had to take up a couple of the floor boards which took several hours. To route the pipes under the floor would have taken nearly a day just to get under the floorboards.

We've temporarily moved the kitchen into the dining room. We had to keep on moving the cooker, which was scratching the floor. So I cut a hole in the wooden cladding, and fed the cable through.

The pipework was a bit of a challenge. I'm used to using pre-soldered joints, so I had to learn how to solder the hard way. We were only without water for a day. The pipes were only 6 foot long, but the stud work is 14 feet, so there were a couple joints in the middle of the runs. Turns out that one of the joints in the middle, and the two elbows coming out of the floor were 'dry' - not enough solder in the joint - and leaked spreading water all over the floor. We had to drain most of the water out of the system again, cut the pipe, solder in new pipe and some interconnect pieces and fill the system again. Eventually I managed to get all the joints soldered properly.

Finally, all the stud work is done including the cupboard round the new location for the boiler, boiler's working just fine and we're onto the next phase of the kitchen.



* I have to say, I don't have much faith in the inspection process. The inspector has considerably less experience than our electrician and assumes no responsibility if it's not right - it's still on the head of the electrician. What's the point in that?