Hi iggs85. I see your point re cost and how you think it may look. I'll attach a photo of one of my semi-recessed basins in stone. We had to use semi-recessed due to space restrictions as well. The benches are 440. Are yours narrower? I did Google stone benchtop offcuts. eBay has some in marble and granite. There appear to be businesses that do sell offcuts. Anyway, I think you would certainly be able to find a beautiful laminate you like. There is such a wide range. There are also some that look so much like stone. Will you have vanity cabinets/drawers under the benchtop? If so, what are your thoughts there? Same laminate or different? Have you visited any shops yet to look at samples?

depends on how often you need the extra bathroom and how much you prepared to spend? (i'd expect a modest redecoration of the old bathroom to cost about $15,000 without changing the location of any fixtures, a new kitchen about $15,000 and the second bathroom needing new complex plumbing, new walls and unexpected extras to cost at least two or three times as much if not more (assuming the BC agrees) and, where will you do your washing?.. contrary to other ideas i would prefer to keep a laundry without the second bathroom but removing part of the wall between kitchen and living area would allow for two options for a new laundry "cupboard" and a more spacious open plan kitchen, dining and living area at a fraction of the cost of the second bathroom...(say $40,000 for new kitchen, Euro laundry, floor coverings etc) my concern with the extra bathroom is finding a connection for the new toilet into the sewer which would probably involve digging a trench in the concrete floor to bury the pipe to connect the new toilet to the sewerage under the existing toilet ..my new kitchen and Euro laundry without relocating plumbing but, if you are prepared to completely rebuild the old bathroom and kitchen and rearrange walls this idea adds an extra bathroom in an easier location

Hi Loraine, Lift up mechanisms can be used on the cabinet widths indicated in your drawings. There are regulations to clerances around gas cooktops (as you know from a previous post) including heights. According to the AS/NZS 5601.1 clearance rate of no less than 600mm for a rangehood taken from the highest part of the highest burner of the gas-cooking appliance (but I recommend 700mm high clearance from the benchtop ergonomically). As for width, personally I would not recommend using a 600mm wide hood over a 750mm cooktop and 900mm is your best option as this provides better catchment area. If you opt for an Undermount, say something like a Falmec, these can provide 1140 cubic mts of extraction an hour compared to older slide-out-hoods that only provide 300 cm/h where this newer type is far more efficient at helping keep your new kitchen clean and fresh. You can easilly achieve this 900mm by taking 50mm off the left and right overheads without disturbing the balance of your design. Hope this is of help. Regards Malcolm

Hey! Those are really good comments. So there's a few ways to address 'bowing' which is where a form deflects due to the static load of concrete over a long span. The most common one is to have bolts running through the concrete, which secure to the outer sides of the forms. Allthread is what is commonly used for this. You may have seen little round marks on concrete walls before. These are where the bolts were. That's why the concrete in those spots looks a bit different. However, sometimes it's not desireable to have those marks left over. In that case you have other options. The simplest is to 'fill as you form' so to speak. You put up the formwork slowly, while filling the concrete. That way the concrete down low is setting, while the concrete on top is wet enough to bond with the new concrete you're adding. This requires a good sense of timing, and is possibly most suitable to small teams happy to use an onsite mixer rather than a truck. And finally, you can install external bracing. This is only mildly represented in the above render. As for shearing loads on corner teeth ... I also included some flat metal bar and all thread to give a sense of how this could be addressed. Alternatively, corners could be built out of additional bricks, like the little 'bracing' structure demonstrated in the render. At this stage all of the above is just theoretical. We're yet to produce enough full sized bricks to test it, but I will be carrying that out over the coming months, and reporting back with detailed drawings and photographs.