Blog 23: The Interior Joinery Factory

Our plan for the kitchen, laundry, pantry, bathroom and garage cabinets and benches etc.. is to re-cycle/up-cycle solid timber joinery (primarily NZ native Rimu) - with the goal of creating a melteca free home and enjoying hand crafted wooden joinery without a second mortgage.

We have sourced some excellent pre-loved cabinets from our friend Elaine’s kitchen renovation, from Phenoix contractors (a local demolition company who pulled them out of the old Napier Hospital) and from Facebook marketplace. We have also sourced an old school concrete laundry tub and some beautiful solid oak wine display shelf units (from the Craggy Range winery) that we are repurposing as pantry shelving.

We have a great supply of Native timber thanks to family and friends - with a special thankyou to Mark who is supplying the native timber for all our bench tops.

So.. we need space for the pre-loved joinery, an upcycling workspace and more space for temporarily storing the ‘new’ joinery ahead of installation. So far we are using Jontelle’s garage as the staging area for the untouched cabinets, the joinery factory work space is in John and Lesley’s carport and garage and first of the finished articles are being stored in a garage in Havelock North.

Our timber benchtops and some cabinet add-on’s are being manufactured for us by Hortops Joinery in Havelock North.

The upcycling of joinery in Willow Drive started in 2019 with the cabinets for our pantry, but the preperation started back in 2018 with Alessandra’s first project of upcycling John and Lesleys letterbox as a learning process on the tools. It’s a Hundertwasser inspired masterwork… and the pictures below tell the story.

We are at the beginning of the interior joinery build, and there is a lot to do, in fact it’s another building project in its own right… our secret sauce is once again friends and family pitching in with their skills and committing their time and space to creating handcrafted, beautiful treasures for our new home.