Kitchen makeover: Day 6

Day 6 was mostly about doing the joints in the worktops. We'd decided to cut them to shape rather than using the joining strips you can get. The old worktops used joining strips and, inevitably bits of food get under the strips. By cutting diagonally into the join and then straight across you can get a proper fit that works with the curved front edge of the surface.

Unfortunately I was using a jigsaw to cut the tops (if I were doing this again I might invest in a router). The jigsaw had a nasty habit of leaning of to one side as the cut was made. Whilst it's easy enough to keep it in line with the line that's marked, underneath the board the blade had flexed so that the cut edge was angled.

This mean a bit of a dodgy hack to cut off the excess of the underside. There were a few hairy moments and some cursing going on but eventually we had three boards that fit each other at right angles to form a U shape.

In terms of actually fitting them together, the worktops are fairly well supported by cupboards so we used mending plates to join them. Before screwing them into place we applied a bead of colorfill to the joined edge. This is a colour matched resin that hardens to produce a pretty seamless gap.

After the worktops were joined, we tiled under where the washing machine and cooker will go and also removed the old cooker hood.

This ugly green monstrosity was well stuck into place as the fixing screws has welded themselves into the wall. In the end I had to literally rip it from the wall (quite good therapy!)...

Today, we're planning to finish the worktops by applying endstrips and then finish the rest of the floor tiling and some other little jobs.