Ambitious DIY
Ambitious DIY project cuts costs by half.
Paul Kiely remembers starting to mess about at his dad’s big tool bench when he was 18 or 19 years old. The youngest in a family of eight, Paul started work as a labourer after school. He built plenty of fences and decks before tackling his first house renovation.
“I’ve renovated 15 houses over the years – and built a couple of houses from scratch. Most of my friends are tradies – plumbers, electricians, builders – so when I’m working on something, my mates help out.”
When Paul bought his current house, he wanted to turn the dining room into a library/office. Somewhere to keep the things he had collected over the years while travelling overseas for business. “I’ve got an eye for antiques and I wanted to build some bookshelves and a desk in that sort of style.”
Cutshop makes it easy!
Paul looked at some designs online and came up with one he was happy with. He gave the dimensions to Simon at Cutshop Mt Wellington and Simon and Karl helped out by making some practical suggestions to alter the design and make it more cost-effective.
“Simon’s experience together with Karl’s cabinetry and programming background was very useful, I can’t speak highly enough of the team at Mt Wellington. I had a look at some of their cabinets and we improved my design. They put the dimensions into the Cutshop system and the cut pieces came out perfectly. The precision machinery meant that every cut was accurate to within 0.5 mm or less.
When I was installing it, everything just slipped into place.”
Great result at half the cost.
Paul was given an estimate of around $12,000 for getting the bookshelves and desk built and installed, but by using Cutshop he landed up paying a whole lot less:
“The whole thing actually cost me $5,000 all up - and, because I installed it myself, the labour was free!
It took me about a week to stain all the timber, put three coats of varnish on and two coats of sealer – then about a day to install. At the end, I stood back, looked at it and thought ‘Wow! I did that.’
Cutshop offer a very good service – it’s a professional, cost-effective business. Simon was happy to help me with any queries after the cut wood had been delivered flat packed. No problem was too big or too small. It was an exciting thing to do – a real creative outlet. Cutshop allows home handymen to go out and tackle bigger projects themselves and get a great result.”
