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RichardB replied to the topic Monthly Competition – December 2024 in the forum Monthly Competition 1 year, 4 months ago
I salute you, Ath. The last time we had a kitchen makeover we had it done professionally, though to be fair to myself that was an intregal part of the deal. To show my respect I am actually responding to your prompt, for a change.
Modelling Therapy
I’ve always been a sucker for a nice model. In my youth I used to build plastic kits (Airfix and suchlike), but the problem with these is that the real skill lies not in the assembly but in the painting, and I’m pretty much ham-fisted with a paintbrush. I hadn’t done anything like this for a good while.
Until I became aware of the existence of large scale model kits, in the case of cars normally in 1/8 size. These are a different sort of kit. The base material is die-cast metal, with some parts in plastic and other materials as appropriate, and everything is pre-coloured. Whoopie, no painting. And assembly is principally by tiny screws, so there’s very little gluing to make a mess of either. Yes, they are expensive, but you can spread payment out over one or two years, getting a box of bits every one or two months. When I discovered that a model was available of one of my all-time favourite cars, the Porsche 917 endurance racer of 1969-71, I succumbed to the lure.
This is the car featured in the Steve McQueen movie Le Mans, but that wasn’t the appeal. Rather, it was that the car was an awesome beast, faster than the Formula One cars of its day, and looked the part. It is, however, not an ideal subject for a beginner in large-scale modelling. It has a complex multi-tubular chassis, and the engine has twelve cylinders and an insane ignition system: twenty-four sparking plugs, two distributors and four coils.
And in this scale there are no excuses, no glossing over. Every detail is depicted. That ignition system has to be wired up. Those sparking plugs, the buckles on the seat belts, the switches on the dashboard and other small details are separate pieces. The door catches work (and have to be assembled). There’s even a separate ignition key, about 3mm long. And some of the screws are just as small.
Now, I am not particularly dextrous (by the way, as a left-hander I object to that word), and I knew I was setting myself a challenge. But I thought it would do me good. It would keep my ageing brain ticking over, and shut out the depressing stuff around and within me by giving me something to focus on. Call it modelling therapy.
Yes, it has been a challenge, and yes, it has been therapeutic. There have been times when, struggling with some particularly fiddly or intractable parts, I’ve thought, ‘Oh God, I’ll never do this.’ And then, spurred on by the thought of all the money I’d be wasting, I’ve tried again and found that I can do it after all. This has taught me the value of perseverance, a virtue I’ve never been conspicuous for. And oh, the satisfaction when it finally comes right. Modelling therapy indeed.
The final challenge is going to be finding somewhere to keep it when it’s finished, because it’ll be nearly two feet long…
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Aha! Yes, having it done professionally was always part of my view of things as well. Then we both agreed to spend more than we probably should on the various bits and pieces. The chap in the shop said, in confidence, our fitting is expensive and you might want to get your own fitter. He hit some keys and offered us in excess of £4.5k for fitting. So we looked around and found that with Christmas approaching, other fitters were (a) thin on the ground and (b) almost as expensive. Result? I reluctantly agreed to do it. I’ve done it three times before in different places, but this was very different. With the amount of pension we’d sunk into it, “good enough” wasn’t going to cut it. Also, instructions were lacking. For instance, the handle-free design we chose has complex aluminium profiles that run the whole length of the kitchen. On day one I discovered that I would have to cut these to fit and work out how the fiddly mounting system worked. And do it straight away because the clock was ticking. Oh yes, the clock. With Christmas, anybody wanting quartz, concrete, stone etc worktops was competing for slots to get laser-templates prepared and fitters to fit them. I had exactly 7 days from delivery to level the floor where needed, sort out new plumbing, move a socket, strip existing tiles and make the wall ready for new tiles, install everything including learning in an hour how to accurately scribe and cut decorative end panels and then do it. All this had to be done to an accuracy of one millimetre per metre for the quartz top. It had to be extremely solid and almost everything is a structural element because of the worktop load. Every day had a head-in-hands moment where I simply didn’t know how I was going to complete a particular task. Not good for the blood pressure. I never intend to do it again.
My God, i salute you again. Fitting tiny bits together that are already the right size, as in my entry piece, is one thing, but I’ve never had the skill to do DIY to such fine tolerances. Now I’m old and can usually find the money to pay for work to be done professionally I try to avoid DIY altogether, though I did manage the other day to mend a garden fence damaged by Storm Darragh.
We were lucky in the fitter sent by the company to do our kitchen. I was impressed by his skill and dedication to perfection, and he was a nice bloke too. ‘I love my job,’ he confided to me once, and I guess that’s the key.
I think it was the number of surprises that wore me down. We looked at finished units in a showroom and it never occurred to me that the various pieces wouldn’t be supplied ready to fit. So when the parts arrived it was a shock to see several 4 metre lengths of aluminium lying amongst them, together with endless bags of anonymous and unexplained parts. We have an integrated fridge and an integrated dishwasher. I’ve fitted “fully” integrated units before and was expecting to find bare cabinets for them. No such luck. They were, it turned out, “built under” units, so I had to work out how they were supposed to be fixed in and how side panels should work with them. Scary stuff for a beginner. Incidentally, if you’ve ever scratched your head over an Ikea assembly diagram, rest assured that the door-fitting and assembly instructions supplied by AEG and Neff for their units make them look like models of simple clarity. There’s a kind of family resemblance with pictures of screws being turned and so on, but whereas with Ikea there is usually some text to help, with these plans there was just nothing. To make it worse, various alternative ways of configuring were shoe-horned onto the same diagrams at the same places. It took me days of visiting the Neff plans before I realised that the entire sheet of instructions was actually a template that could be placed on the door panel because it didn’t mention this anywhere, and it was not even slightly obvious. All great fun.
You are right Ath, paying for installation is rather expensive so I’ve opted for Christmas at daughters and have been gutting the kitchen myself. Also sourced some of the new items myself, although, like you, have gone for integral fridge and dishwasher.
So far I’ve emptied the cupboards and removed all the upper ones the extractor fan and tiling. The lower cupboards, oven, and dishwasher will go after Christmas. Its definitely a bit echoey in there now.
I’m really lucky that one sons old school friend is a chippy who fits kitchens for a living and the other ones mate is a plasterer both booked for new year which will keep my costs down.