Space Plugs
Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2013 1:56 pm
Ok thought I’d a post on how useful these little Space Plug gizmos are....
This is the first of 2 examples I’ll post up.
The end result of this task relates to corner fillets. Handless 'J' profile doors are very popular at the minute and when it comes to corner fillets it always looks nicer to carry that profile in to the corner. The way to do this is to buy spare doors and cut them down to make your own. Normally a 150mm or 300mm door depending on how large the fillet needs to be.
Here is an example of doing that.
As mentioned this is by cutting down a door to form the corner. However it does require the use of a good rail saw which can be expensive for some. You create the 'j' profile by cutting mitres
Then gluing the pieces together.
Now here is a kitchen we're doing as part of a full flat refurb.
Before
A lot of thought has gone in to this kitchen and a lot of dimensions in the room have been engineered. For example the boxing around the soil stack was rebuilt so it allowed us to gain vital extra depth to a wall unit we planned to put in front of it. We only gained just under 30mm but that was the difference between being able to use that unit for bottles of sauces /oils and not. This unit is actually quite important, not only to be usable but also for the aesthetics of the room and carrying on a bank of units you'll see later.
We also installed a pocket door at one end of the kitchen. The placement of which allowed us once again to engineer the dimensions of the room. This time the end results was to allow us to perfectly fit kitchen units along the length of the room and not have to use filler panels to close up any unwanted gaps
So with the room built, ceilings lowered for LED asymmetrical side firing down lights and ceiling speakers, plastered and decorated (ignore the colour as I changed it slightly because it wasn't quite right for what I wanted) we are ready to start fitting the kitchen.
Here is the kitchen in its current state. Waiting for quartz worktops and coloured glass splash backs which will be painted to match the wall colour.
Now whilst we could engineer the length of the room, it wasn't so easy to do this with the width of the room as it was only out by 8mm from perfect. Now when I say perfect this relates to the corner fillets which will go in. That 8mm extra width is the difference between using pre-formed off the shelf corner fillets or having to make our own once again.
We had always planned to make our own to overcome this 8mm gap. However we didn't need to because by using space plugs it allowed us once again to engineer exactly where the front of the units would fall.
So one side of the kitchen was brought out by 3mm...
and the other side was brought out by 5mm...
The beauty of the space plugs is that with each turn of the thread you can fine tune your packing out. No messing around trying 2mm then 3mm, placing an extra 1mm on top etc etc. Just turn the space plug and it pushes it out for you. A lot quicker! What’s more if one side of the unit needs packing out by 4mm and the other 5mm, again it's quick and easy to do so. A big time saver without a doubt.
Now as mentioned we could have overcome this 8mm gap by making our own corner fillet and would still look great, but the space plugs saved us time by allowing us to use a preformed corner fillet and get on with other tasks.
The above is just one example of how they help you but the other benefit is that you're not messing around trying to fit small 'L' brackets in tight corners and although we had solid brick walls in this kitchen, had they have been stud walls we could have moved the placement of the space plugs to make sure we were fixing to studs and not cavities.
Give me 20 mins and I’ll post how they helped us in the bathroom too
This is the first of 2 examples I’ll post up.
The end result of this task relates to corner fillets. Handless 'J' profile doors are very popular at the minute and when it comes to corner fillets it always looks nicer to carry that profile in to the corner. The way to do this is to buy spare doors and cut them down to make your own. Normally a 150mm or 300mm door depending on how large the fillet needs to be.
Here is an example of doing that.
As mentioned this is by cutting down a door to form the corner. However it does require the use of a good rail saw which can be expensive for some. You create the 'j' profile by cutting mitres
Then gluing the pieces together.
Now here is a kitchen we're doing as part of a full flat refurb.
Before
A lot of thought has gone in to this kitchen and a lot of dimensions in the room have been engineered. For example the boxing around the soil stack was rebuilt so it allowed us to gain vital extra depth to a wall unit we planned to put in front of it. We only gained just under 30mm but that was the difference between being able to use that unit for bottles of sauces /oils and not. This unit is actually quite important, not only to be usable but also for the aesthetics of the room and carrying on a bank of units you'll see later.
We also installed a pocket door at one end of the kitchen. The placement of which allowed us once again to engineer the dimensions of the room. This time the end results was to allow us to perfectly fit kitchen units along the length of the room and not have to use filler panels to close up any unwanted gaps
So with the room built, ceilings lowered for LED asymmetrical side firing down lights and ceiling speakers, plastered and decorated (ignore the colour as I changed it slightly because it wasn't quite right for what I wanted) we are ready to start fitting the kitchen.
Here is the kitchen in its current state. Waiting for quartz worktops and coloured glass splash backs which will be painted to match the wall colour.
Now whilst we could engineer the length of the room, it wasn't so easy to do this with the width of the room as it was only out by 8mm from perfect. Now when I say perfect this relates to the corner fillets which will go in. That 8mm extra width is the difference between using pre-formed off the shelf corner fillets or having to make our own once again.
We had always planned to make our own to overcome this 8mm gap. However we didn't need to because by using space plugs it allowed us once again to engineer exactly where the front of the units would fall.
So one side of the kitchen was brought out by 3mm...
and the other side was brought out by 5mm...
The beauty of the space plugs is that with each turn of the thread you can fine tune your packing out. No messing around trying 2mm then 3mm, placing an extra 1mm on top etc etc. Just turn the space plug and it pushes it out for you. A lot quicker! What’s more if one side of the unit needs packing out by 4mm and the other 5mm, again it's quick and easy to do so. A big time saver without a doubt.
Now as mentioned we could have overcome this 8mm gap by making our own corner fillet and would still look great, but the space plugs saved us time by allowing us to use a preformed corner fillet and get on with other tasks.
The above is just one example of how they help you but the other benefit is that you're not messing around trying to fit small 'L' brackets in tight corners and although we had solid brick walls in this kitchen, had they have been stud walls we could have moved the placement of the space plugs to make sure we were fixing to studs and not cavities.
Give me 20 mins and I’ll post how they helped us in the bathroom too
hope that they take off and are stocked in the likes of howdens and builders merchants. I look forward to using the sample pack sent free of charge on the next kitchen I fit.
but we'd use loctite on the threads because they were under constant vibration from people walking across the floor.
