Kitting out the kitchen, and starting on the dining room

The cabinets are all in place, and the counter top is on. We had some difficulty getting it in place as the length was a few millimetres too long. We also had the forced air pipe to deal with. I had to cut a slot in the back of the piece, and there was a window frame at the other end of the top. Thing is, we could have avoided a lot of the problems. The company that made the counter top can only make them in 10ft sections, and ours is 14ft long. They offered to join the two sections together, an offer I took, but I wish I hadn't. It made it very difficult to get in place, especially when we found it was just a fraction too long. We've put a bit of a dent in couple of the walls doing it. Shouldn't be too difficult to fix - bit of drywall compound and it'll be invisible. We've also got the power cable for the cooker moved, so we can complete the cabinet installation.



We've also got a lot of the lights put in around the building, replacing all the older fixtures. All the lights were at least 30 years old - some older.

The dining room

We've started work on the dining room. Not much to do in there except remove the walls, insulate and re-gyprock.

Stripping walls is time consuming, but we've managed to cut that time down by being a little more violent with the wall. When we started, we were quite gentle with the plaster, picking pieces of lathe off one by one with a wrecking bar. We've learnt not to go too close to electrics, but otherwise you can be a lot quicker with piece of 2 by 4. Open up the wall with the wrecking bar, or drill and reciprocating saw/circular saw, then slide the 2 by 4 in and pull back. The plaster peels off the wall in sheets, and the lathe just pops off. Now all we've got to do is work out a quick way to make sure all the nails come out of the studs. Currently we're taking them out, one by one with the wrecking bar or claw hammer. Using this technique though, we managed to strip, insulate, vapour barrier, and started to gyprock a 16ft wall in two days. Considerably faster than the week it took to just strip the walls in the nursery.