Project "Our Hive": The Kitchen

It's been too long since I updated this blog on our home. The last time I wrote about the house was on the day our kitchen cabinets were being installed which was last July. The designer from Kian Classic told me that the installation would take one day but it turned out that they had to continue the next day. Unfortunately, after two days, the cabinets were only 85% completed because the following were yet to be installed:

1. One of the doors above the cooker hood.
   It had some defect and they had to take it back to the factory.
2. The solid surface countertop.
   As I was told by the designer, the actual measurements for the countertop can only be taken after the cabinets are installed. This is to make sure that the top perfectly fits on top of the cabinets. So the countertop was only installed a week after the cabinets were fixed.
3. The kitchen sink.
   The cabinet installers were not plumbers so they could not fix the free sink and tap given. So, we had to arrange for the Kian Classic plumber to come another time.

During this time we were constantly coming to the house and waiting for these people to turn up. Mind you these contractors are not really punctual. We sometimes had to wait more than an hour for them to arrive. So, Shah was already getting annoyed with me for not arranging everything to be installed at the same time. To appease Shah, I arranged for the cabinet door replacement to be fixed on the same day the kitchen appliances were to be installed which was in August. That way we could have everything fixed at the same time.  We also had another hiccup related to the kitchen. The designer made some wrong calculations on the side where the fridge was to be placed. The divider for the fridge was placed exactly where the socket points were. So, we had to get an electrician to shift the sockets to accomodate the divider.

Anyway, these are some points you should do when designing and installing your kitchen cabinets so that you won't have to put up with all the hassle like I did.

1. Make sure the designer takes proper measurements of your kitchen and takes extra measurements on the position of the kitchen sink inlet, outlet and all socket points.
2. Arrange for the contrators to come on the same day and remind them to be on time.
3. Be sure to have the cooker hood contractor come over to assess your kitchen before finalising the cabinet design.

So, before I leave you, below is the drawing of the designed kitchen cabinet before we finalised the countertop to be in white.

Now, these are pictures  of our completed kitchen withn appliances. The only aplliances left to put in is the fridge and microwave oven. Our ducting was supposed to be hidden inside the top wall cabinets but due to the presence of a beam at the corner where the cabinet ended, the ducting had to be exposed. My mistake since I didn't get the contractors to come survey the kitchen before the design cabinet was finalised. Even with all the hiccups, I am very much satisfied with the workmanship and I can't wait to use the kitchen.