DANGER OF THE WEEK AWARD

Bad – Kitchen Fitters

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The original request at this property was to replace the bathroom appliances, move the tub and add a shower, install some new lighting, put in a shower extractor, add a razor socket, change the radiator and add a wet towel warmer with electrical backup and then tile. Sounds easy enough but the moving of pipe work led to finding issues with the previous ‘plumber’s’ work, we found DOZENS of electrical faults throughout the house and newly installed consumer unit that were a mix of both major and minor problems and we found this kitchen that was fit by a large national company that rhymes with P U.

We can’t prove who screwed up the electrics and caused some very serious safety breaches. We can’t prove who wreaked havoc with the plumbing and the ‘up hill’ waste pipe work . We do however have the receipts for the company who installed the kitchen and supplied the fitter. The kitchen looks more like a patch work quilt than smartly fitted cabinet work. The two pictures above are an just one example of the poorly cabinets.

The upper cabinets in the left and right hand picture should be perfectly centred above the ceramic kitchen basin. If you look at the details of where the overhead cabinets meet the full height cabinets you can see that the end panels have been cut to differing heights at each side. The left hand end panel runs from the bottom of the tall cabinet to the bottom of the overhead cabinet. The right side panel however runs from the bottom of the tall cabinet right to the top. While on the subject of the end panels the right end panel does not come down far enough to join up with the bottom of the cupboard and leaves a small gap just above the trim work. As the end panels were cut wrong the upper cabinets could not possibly be centred so the fitter then planed down a sliver of an end panel and attached it to the door unit on the upper right cabinet. To further punctuate the mistake the fitter trimmed the sliver of wood unevenly and then screwed it to the door. You can see the gaps between the door and the added trim piece! They look a lot worse in real life!

So how should the cabinets have been fit to eliminate the mistakes? The initial problem was probably made with the design team who measure up and then show the home owner a few pretty coloured prints of how good the kitchen will look. Most of the time this works out but sometimes the fitter may have to squeeze an extra inch from the room to make everything fit. It’s hard to tell from the pictures but the only choice in this kitchen was to plane the side panels down to half of there original thickness which would have allowed the upper cabinets to be properly centred. With the cabinets centred all of the other issues would have vanished.

It looks as though M. C. Escher installed this kitchen and not a professional kitchen fitter backed by a big company with a design team, lots of expertise and hundreds of models to choose from.  Always vet your kitchen fitter before allowing them into your home. Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Kitchen fitting is as much art as it is technical and the difference between good and bad comes only with experience. There are lots of one to four day courses on the web but I would defy anyone to learn how to fit a set of straight, plumb and level kitchen cabinets in an old Victorian house that’s been skimmed ten times and has un-level, un-square and non-plumbed doors, windows, floors, walls and ceilings. To add to that puzzle there are always changes required to the electrics (Part-P) that require some real  thinking to sort out safely, safety issues relating to boiler location (DO NOT BOX IN YOU BOILER!!!!!!!),central heating pipe work, flues, gas and general plumbing. After years and years and years of fitting and modifying kitchens  I can assure you that kitchens are the most challenging of jobs to do creatively but also the most satisfying when done correctly.

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