Friday 2 December 2011

Kitchen (scullery) opening

So, the tiling is done, the grouting is done, the sealant is round the sink unit and the secondary double glazing is in place.  After a 5-months project, our 'back kitchen' or 'scullery' is officially open.  It's not the cooking part of the kitchen, but it houses the freezer and dishwasher, provides loads of storage, and gives us a long run of worktop which should make preparation work positively enjoyable.


This is what part of it looked like when I started:



One of the late purchases was the waterproof grout.  In spite of the fact that the pack promised enough grout for 300 tiles (and I had used 162) I only just had enough for the job - such a close thing, in fact, that there is none to put into stock.  This got me thinking about the business of estimating for jobs.  I think I have got better at this over the years, but I do still have a tendency to over-order (hence the stock items!)  This is partly because it's such a pain to be held up on a job if you run out of something, and partly because the cost of a job has to be assessed in terms of time as well as materials.  What I can't manage to do, however, is take the professional's hard-headed attitude to the bits left over and treat them as trade waste - even, these days, having to pay to dispose of them at the tip.  No wonder our children count on there being available cuphooks, shelves, windscreen wiper blades, etc, etc, for them to dip into in the workshop.  Just fine as long as they don't need any grout.


2 comments:

  1. How about selling some stock on eBay? Just a thought! It's all
    Looking fab.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks good Ian. Takes me back a few years to when we did ours.

    ReplyDelete