Our fitted kitchen must be six-ish years old now. It’s nice. I like it. We got it built/made to measure by those Swedish people. No, not Volvo. And also no, not Abba. Or Nokia. The other Swedish people. You know, the ones whose name begins with I and ends with kea. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I like it. Except for the one cupboard door. It’s a double cupboard. The left-hand door has offered us no trouble at all. No agitation. Not even a whispered discord. The right-hand door, however, has given me/us some hardship. Or has it? Maybe I’m being unkind to the right-hand door here.
The problem, you see, is the upper hinge (and only the upper hinge) became detached about five-ish months ago. These hinges are cunningly designed:
The first thing you’ll notice is there are no visible screws. That’s proper cunning that is. Anyway, you have to fiddle the soft closer off the hinge and that leaves you with:
Inset in the photo on the left is what sits underneath the hinge, it’s the fixing bracket. Getting the hinge off is an interesting test: neither of those two screws will do it for you, there’s a little fiddly clip right at the back of the hinge which you have to press.
When fully pressed, the hinge just slides off the clip. Cunning, eh?
The trouble is, when I’d got the hinge off the clip at the top of the right-hand door, it looked like this:
You’ll no doubt notice that the screw fits into a rawlplug/jackety thing that is part of the bracket. And also that the potential headspace for a replacement screw is very limited. Anyway, on with the story.
The last time I had this problem I fixed it by unpicking some of the white surface and an application of Gorilla Glue into the peghole and across the surface. Unfortunately this fix only lasted a few months because a couple of days ago it started hanging off again.
This time I’ve fixed it with another application of Gorilla Glue. And a longer, slightly fatter screw (which I had to narrow the head so it would fit between the two hinge hook things that are critical to the door fitting back on.
Anyway. Done it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Your blog seems to be turning into one of those “How To Do It” websites.
Next week, could you do one on how to re-lay your patio?
You see, Young Masher, this is my life now. I’m either walking the dogs (seems to be about 60% of my daily schedule), writing (about 10% of the time), doing housework (about 10% of the time), doing DIY (about 10% of the time), being a taxi service (about 5% of the time), or catching up on miscellaneous things like eating, reading, watching the (very) occasional episode of The Expanse or Buffy or going to the vet and/or pet shop (about 5% of the time). Life’s not dull; I can never say I’ve got nothing to do.