Hung Well

For quite a few weeks now, we've been wanting to get started on making this opening between the kitchen and dining room look a bit more finished. It's been looking like this for about a year and a half now, which is kind of disgraceful.

We started at the other end of the opening, near the back door, with attempting to cover up the big raw brown timber post.

As you can see here, it sits behind the level of the VJ boards. So, to cover it up, we cut a scrap VJ to the right size, and slotted it in.

And repeated the process with another smaller piece to finish it off. We weren't too worried about having a visible seam between the two, because we would eventually cover them up with timber trim.

And then we realised something. Because this was actually before we got our fancy new benchtops, and we knew that our plan was to have the benchtop overhang the back of the peninsula cabinets quite a bit, to allow for a breakfast bar, we realised that the door was going to be very much in the way.

 

This is because, at the time (pre-benchtop), the door hung inwards. That wasn't going to work, because it would crash straight into our benchtop overhang. In the long term, our plan is not to have a back door at all, but for the moment it's quite convenient being able to have easy access to the shed in the backyard. So, we decided to re-hang the door so that it would open outwards without interfering with our benchtop.

Tom removed the door (you can see this was while we were still halfway through opening up the second kitchen window) and turned the hinges around.

And then he cut some new notches in the doorframe, a bit further out...

so that the hinges would have enough room to allow the door to close properly in its new direction.

It was a two-person job to hold the door up in place to test whether it fitted nicely...

And then it was a relatively simple matter of screwing the hinges back into the doorframe. Although nothing's ever truly simple. There's always lots of mucking around to make sure things actually fit properly.

And now, with our new benchtop in, it looks like this!

Definitely not a dramatic change, but it allows us to keep using that door for a while rather than having to close the opening in immediately.

As happens so often in renovating, the job we started out doing ended up in an entirely different job. Hopefully next time we work on the kitchen trim we'll accomplish a bit more!