Trixee's Passive Solar Build Perth

Isn't it just! We've heard our stone is facing a bit of a delay for some reason so I guess for the next week not much will happen for us

Cabinets! Can't wait to see.

In keeping with tradition, it's not going in when they said it would be. Just been informed they're going in TOMORROW.

And photos I forgot to say - I hope you take lots of photos of the kitchen for us to admire!

Arrrh it always ends up being tomorrow doesn't it

At least it's "tomorrow" not "next week"...lol...

Photos too please...!

Photo time yet?!! I hope you are happy with the install trixee and the finish is all good.

Fingers crossed for you Trixee

Sorry I didn't get around to posting earlier, it was a combination of shock and just being generally busy this weekend.

I'm still in a quandry. I don't love the cabinetry. In retrospect, I would have been better off just going with a plain black laminex rather than spending thousands on the expensive veneer. First Lesson learned. Second lesson, don't listen to interior designers, they're full of crap. They're just a person with an opinion, and though you would expect them to be informed, sometimes they just aren't. They're not practical people, all they care about is aesthetics, even though they'll tell you otherwise. They know jack. Not impressed. The one who recommended the veneer didn't take cleaning into consideration at all, and I now know that this will be a b!tch to maintain, as you can tell from how the dust interacts with it and all the smudges everywhere.

I'm also not at all happy with the quality of the veneer application, but am hoping that it will clean up OK. The edges look like they have glue residue and the dust is gathering there, and it looks like the veneer has a slight curl at the edges. But I won't know if this is an issue until they come back and fix all their work. Some drawers still don't open properly, some things are misaligned, some doors have chips in them. They couldn't be bothered installing the dishwasher, so that has the potential to interrupt the tiling work that's starting today.

The cabinetmaker made changes to the plans, which, although we signed off on them, we didn't read them properly and compare them with the previous set of plans. Partially because we were sick of it, partially because we had spoken to him a week beforehand so assumed all changes had been verbally communicated, partially because of pressure by the builder due to their "email problems". Third lesson learned. Assume everyone makes stupid design decisions. He'd made some design decisions that I was not at all happy with, and they were on the plan but not discussed at the meeting, so they caught me by surprise. Such as the push to open overheads, which up until now I'd always understood to be finger pull, which is cheaper and more usable. The sad thing is, he probably thought he was doing us a favour, but now our overheads are going to be smudge city whenever we use them.

Anyway, enough whining, here are some pictures. It doesn't look too bad from a distance, just not when you get up close.

Kitchen overview: If you look closely you might be able to see the dust and smudginess. Also, the C-rails are shiny black, I wanted matte. Potential solution: paint them matte black after handover, or wait until the ovens are in, they might look better by then (or I might have gotten used to it):
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Close-up: dust everywhere. They've also done something funky with the drawers, I expected to see the c-rail between each drawer. It looked weird to me then. I was somewhat mollified when I saw the same thing at another house on Sunday. The upside as hubby pointed out also is that it gives us a bit more drawer height.
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On the bright side, I'm happy with the number of bins we have. For some reason I thought we were getting two, but we have four! I would be even happier if the drawers opened without scraping against each other though.
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The bar looks nice:
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The ensuite looks OK, except they seem to have forgotten the mirrors. I don't know if they just stuffed up, or if it normally goes on afterwards anyway.
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I'm disappointed with the bathroom, I thought we were getting door handles but they've done a black c-rail instead, which I think looks odd. Hopefully it will look better once the tiles go in.
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This next one is so hideous I just want to rip it out and start again. I've already chosen the ikea module. Aside from the laminex looking hideous (designers, if you want to experiment with selections, do it in your own goddamn time! In my meeting with the cabinetmaker, I presented an alternative I wanted to swap it out with, and he convinced me to stay with the initial selection because he'd never used it before and wanted to see what it looked like!). Aside from looking hideous, it's now completely non-functional because the shelves are too narrow. I was providing an INTERNAL measurement, cabinetmaker converted it to an EXTERNAL measurement. Hello! They should know by now that Normal people always talk in internal measurements! If it looked hideous but was still functional, I could handle it, but this is just ruined now.
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So, cabinets for me were a complete let down. Of all the things to go wrong, this was one thing that I was praying would be OK. We spent so much effort and energy on the detail in the initial plans. On top of that, there are so many other imperfections in the build that I'm starting to get really angry at the lack of attention to detail. I'm going to be totally brutal at PCI and pore over every single detail.

So my mood at the moment could best be described as: pissy. Is there an emoji for that?