Archive for July, 2009

Operation Kitchen Storm – day 2

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

After a good night of sleep, dreaming about destroying kitchen parts, we successfully woke up and reinitiated the kitchen rebuilding. As we are still in “Project Mayhem” most of our work will be of destructional nature.

A glimpse into the past

This blog series does not only serve as a practical guide for (for amaturs up to experts) of how to rebuild your own kitchen – it’s also educational. Therefore I will try to inject some interesting facts as we go along. The house itself, nicely situated on Hökens gata close to Mosebacke, was built in 1858, this was the year after the big fire on Södermalm that burnt down all houses (even the theatre). I think this also was the same decade our olden king Gustav Vasa liberated Sweden from some occuping forces. Considering how long ago this was (just look at the silly beard), it was to no surprise that the floor looked really bad as it was probably installed in the same epoch (cheap floors during wars). Then all the spilling of food on it for many decades has certainly left it in a very bad shape. So as we are doing this properly, rest assured that we are building a new floor.
This is Gustav Vasa:
Olden king with a beard
And here is the olden floor:
Olden floor

New floor made of cutted planks

Luckily we found some planks laying around. Unluckely the planks didn’t fit on the floor so we had to cut them first.
Cutting planks is really easy if you have the right tools & knowledge (gathered during project Hawkeye). In short, cutting a plank can be done in two ways, either by hand or by a cutting-machine. We got a cutting-machine to do the work for us as we didn’t want to get blisters in our hands.
Look and learn:
Phil cutting

Risk assesments

Rebuilding a kitchen can be dangerous if you don’t assess the risks properly as you go along. This is not only a part of “Project Hawk Eye” (see the mission plan above) but also an iterative process that you should take seriously throughout the operation. This is our system: Everytime we encountered a risk one the encountee loudly calls out for a risk assessment: “Risk assessment”. Then the other one carefully approaches the risk and we evaluate it together. One example of this is electricity. After taking safety precautions along our risk assessment we proceed. Here we can see how Philip is carefully detaching a on-off button, note the plastic handle on the screwdriver, the gloves and the face mask (spark protection) :
Phil demounting on-off button
*don’t try this yourself unless you really know what you are doing (feel free to ask us in the comments if you are unsure)

Day 2 Summary

We did a really good work today, cutting a floor and neutralizing risks, we have learn alot about electricity and wood cutting (easy peasy lemon squeezy). We are not sure what to do next, either we start to reroute the waterpipes or perhaps paint something (would be nice to start on “project Eden” as it’s probably even more fun).

Rest assured that this journey of insight and knowledge will continue.

Operation Kitchen Storm – Day 1

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Today I will initiate a kitchen rebuilding project, starting by removing the current kitchen and then putting a new one in (also a kitchen). Todo this I’ve called upon an old friend from Switzerlands – namely – Philip.

Planning is A and O (as we say in Sweden)

Since I have some prior building experience I know that planning is the most important part, understanding exactly what to remove and what to put in. Some people even use some advanced instruments (such as yardsticks) to measure that new cobbars acctually fit, sometimes this is done in cm but some people use inches (I guess inches are used for greater distances, such as hospitals). But I don’t think those overly-complicated tools are necessary for us, as we accually have building experience, also, I don’t think “the naked chef” uses a ruler every time he slices a bread.

So what I did was a plan with some blueprints. Since I don’t have PowerPoint (which I understand that most architects use to draw rooms and even houses) I did it by hand on a board. This is me revealing the plan to Philip as he just arrived:
Me reveling the action plan

And here is a close up of the actual plan (feel free to reuse it, I’ve put the plan in the Public Domain)
The plan
We divided it into three parts, project Hawk Eye, project Mayhem and project Eden, even though this may sound complicated it is very intiutivly once you get a hang of it. Rest assured that you will understand it when this blog series is over.

Project Mayhem – day 1

Since I stretched a muscle in my back, Philip had to do all the heavy lifting, we can clearly see that here:
Phil Vs Oven
And here:
Phil Vs Oven
Rest assured that the oven was carried to the garbage room and that Phils back is ok.
Here are some more pictures to inspire you to rebuild your home:
Phil Vs Wall

This is what we managed to produce during day one:
Post strike
As you can see we cunningly left the sink with all the pipes going around, and I admit that the reason is that we don’t know what to do with all the water that is going to spray when we hammer them. But rest assured that we will deal with them in a future blog post once we have read the water pipe instructions on wikipedia. My guess is that we have a many towels (at least 10 big ones (not the small hand towels)) and a few buckets. So one of us manages the water collection into the buckets while the other reroute the pipes. But that is just a guess so don’t try that. Look on wikipedia first.

Team picture of two true handymen:
Team