2023 November and December - Kitchen Benchtop

           The Kaboodle kitchen benchtop prices started at $300 and went up from there, meanwhile there was available this acacia panel for only $100 which was absolutely beautiful, so we bought that instead. It is made by glueing together lots of smaller pieces of acacia.

          Here it is temporarily placed on the kitchen cupboards, of course it needed to be cut to length to fit the cupboards.

          Josh did a perfect job cutting it with the cordless circular saw. There was another shorter piece cut from the same length for the left side cupboard. In the below photo you can also see the new fridge placed on the right hand side. Yes we chose black to go with the doors lol.

          Now we knew the exact placement of the cupboards, we could cut the holes in the back of the cupboards for the kitchen tap inlets to poke through.

          Also the hole for the gas pipe to come through for the gas stove.

          The next step was to cut out the hole for the sink to fit into. After carefully marking the line, Josh is using the multitool to cut out the middle section. It seemed such a shame to ruin an absolutely beautiful benchtop by chopping it up, but it had to be done or we wouldn't have a sink.

          Here is the slab in place with the hole ready for the sink.

          Below you can see the sink fits perfectly in place. This was definitely a good time to remember to measure twice, cut once! Josh did an amazing job.

          By this time we had also attached the 3 drawer fronts, as better seen in the below photo. As well you can see that the tap is attached to the sink. We thought that our black doors on the kitchen cupboards looked absolutely amazing, although they are certainly difficult to photograph!

        But before you can have water coming into the sink, we had to set up the drainage so water could go out of the sink without spilling all over the floor! Unfortunately the pipes from the sink did not quite line up with the floor outlet and so it was yet another job that couldn't be quite finished without an hour and a half hour drive to Bunnings at Lismore for more pipe parts, again. What's that - maybe $40 in petrol and a day of work lost... That's what happens when you live rurally!

       Yay all the pipes are finally correctly set up to drain! As you can see in the below photo, a hole was also cut in the bottom of this cupboard to connect to the drainage pipe which the plumber had installed when doing the "roughing in".

          I made a temporary greasetrap, with layers of filtering material of charcoal, gravel, small stone and wood chip held in place with shadecloth. The trick with a greasetrap is to have the outlet below the water line so that when the grease in the washing-up water cools and solidifies then it will float on the top of the water and never get flushed out the other end. We have a proper greasetrap currently set up on the caravan sink, so we can move that to be part of the official approved greywater system when we install it.

          Here you can see the black drainage pipe coming from the kitchen sink and running under the house into a trench that I dug so that it won't be a trip hazard. One of the benefits of building on a sloping site is that it is easy to get water to run downhill when you want drainage. After testing the greasetrap we were pleased to see that the water coming out the other end was clear and clean. This meant that we could now do the washing-up in the house, a very exciting step for us after all these years of doing it outside in the weather and mosquitos. I know you city people take these things for granted, but we definitely appreciate every step we take towards an easier life.

      All the installation here looks very quick and easy to read on this blog post, but this was two months of work condensed plus all the other stuff we were doing at the same time. It has taken me over two hours just write this info and upload the photos! Next episode - installation of the bath and shower panels.