January 14th, 2009
With the house we moved into last year, came a fully fitted kitchen. In that kitchen, we had the joy of owning a Cooker Hood whose claim to fame was blowing a circuit board every time a bulb needed replacing. So having scrimped and saved we ordered up a new cooker hood from Comet. We went for the NEFF D97G5 because of the Which Best Buy recommendation for quality and build.
The cooker hood was delivered bang on time by Comet and we were set for a simple installation job…… Paul was keen to do it this evening, despite my protestations that it is a full days job……Regardless of this, he started……You know it is coming don’t you……. This is where it all went wrong.
To dismantle the old cooker hood, which had been fitted tightly by Walter, we had to bend a bit of metal to get it off the wall. The result was we rendered it useless. This was not a problem at the time, given we planned to send it to the recycling centre. Hold that thought….. We unpacked the nice new shiny cooker hood which having cost well over half a grand looks stylish, contemporary and in keeping with the trendy modern fashionable people we are.
The instructions were very clear and simple to follow and it was all going well until we placed the paper template against the wall in readiness for a bit of power drilling….. There were a number of problems that suddenly hit home.
The power socket and current ventilation hole were bang in the middle of the paper template where we needed to drill. Drilling into an electric socket and a vacuous hole was therefore not going to work. Much scratching, huffing, puffing and swearing (under breath) followed. In the end the only thing is the electric socket will need to move and the hole will need to move.
Going into the garage to check where the hole could realistically move up too was when the second blow hit home….. Directly above the current hole are three main hot and cold water pipes running from the boiler across the top of the wall up to our first floor. This now makes the moving of the hole impossible without re-routing all the hot and cold water pipes running upstairs. Brilliant… Not!
In the end the only option is to call in a builder, to a) move the electric socket, b) fill in the current hole (keeping in mind whatever is used to fill it in with will have to carry the weight of the new cooker hood) and c) open up a new hole on the outside wall and install some additional trunking to connect it to the cooker hood. All in all its turning into a major expensive job.
With our minds finally settled on this as being the only option we momentarily thought about putting the old cooker hood back up for now, until of course we surveyed the bent twisted wreck that lay on the floor.
Hey Ho, another Pryordurkin day comes to an end.
Posted in Personal