I really enjoyed doing this project even though it was challenging at times. I had 3 days of work in this so far, and I would say it’s about 90% finished. This whole project started when the owner bought this house which came with a few sheds. In one of these, the previous owner made a bar counter and shelving out of scaffolding boards. Which for the time looked ok, but the current owner wanted to make this look a bit more professional. So the plan was that all the painted scaffolding board surfaces and shelves are coming out and we replace them with solid wooden kitchen worktops. The bar counter will have a marble top, we make sure the sink is working properly and we set up a beer pump as well.
The first phase was the shelving and surfaces. All the shelves were sitting over those hipster steel pipework-like brackets. The owner wanted to keep the brackets as they looked nice but he couldn’t stand the look of the wonky and sticky scaffold boards. He also just recently finished updating his kitchen so he had a lot of offcut worktops from the new and the all of the old worktops as well. These were my materials to work with. Luckily both the old worktops and the new worktops were made from solid wood so they were quite similar in looks. The only challenge was that they were different thickness so I had to plan wisely to make sure there were no joints visible where you could spot this difference.
Once I measured everything and made some plans how to work with the materials, I got going. I started with two large shelves. I had three large pieces from the older/thinner worktop so I had to use them for the large shelves. The shelf wasn’t square and it had a step-in on the long side of it. When I checked and double-checked my measurements, I set up my cutting rig.
A couple of foldable saw horses, squares and long spirit levels, hand saw, jigsaw and my trusty circular saw. I used a pair of F clamps and a spirit level to act as a guide for my circular saw as I had to make a few long (nearly 2 meters long) cuts as well. Once the first shelf was cut, I tried how it would sit on its frame. I won’t lie it was hard graft to move these long and wide (over 2 metres by 50 cm) shelves around. I definitely felt my arms and shoulders at the end of the day. When I finished cutting both shelves, I started sanding. The old wooden surface needed some sanding to bring it back to its former glory, but once it was finished, it definitely looked good on the shelving racks.
After the shelves, I moved on to the bar counter. The counter top scaffold boards were to stay at their place and two new marble blocks were to go on top of them. These pieces were originally part of a fireplace hearth and surround. They needed a fair bit of work before I could install them. Firstly, cutting of course. Cutting marble is a dusty business. I used all my PPE I had (gloves, goggles, earmuffs and masks) and my old 4 inch grinder with a fresh diamond blade in it. Once the dust settled, I had a dry run on fitting them. Obviously, the previous scaffold board surface was far from flat and level so I spent the next half an hour or so by packing and levelling the marble parts. Once this was finished I could carefully take those marble panels off and started to stick everything down: packers first and then the marble slabs. And this was pretty much the end of day one.
On the second day, I started again with the big sanded shelves. Now that they looked good on their brackets, it was time to take them off. I needed them off from their brackets in order to get to the bar worktop beneath them. So shelves off, brackets off – I marked them first to make sure I can put them back the same way – and finally, worktop off. Along with the worktop I took out a small sink as well, so I had to make sure all water pipes are off and the waste is capped as well (I don’t like to work in drain smell).
After all this, I started to measure up for the new worktop. It was a painstakingly long process for many reasons. I had to make a new worktop exactly the same size as the old one. The old one of course was far from being square, there were cuts all around the edges to allow for the frame of the bar. and I had to cut out a large chunk for the sink as well. So after it felt like an eternity I had to new worktop marked and cut. It was time to level it and fit it to the frame. At this point I felt that it all starts to come together. We already had the bar countertop and the worktop right below fitted and I could start to re-assemble the shelf brackets and the shelves.
The last day I spent on finishing up the sink, building another layer of shelves below the worktop, fitting the beer pump on the bar counter and fitting skirting board all around the shed. This day I finished mid-afternoon and I could spend the rest of the afternoon packing and tidying up everything. There is still a bit of work left around the sink but we will pick that up a later time. The customer was really happy with the work and I was satisfied with the end result too.
Screw it! 