The Ikea excuse is no defence or Ikea would be out of business and you paid
him to know how to do the job properly.

Does he belong to any trade organisations. I'd ring trading standards and
see what they say. Small claims may be worth trying but I wonder if its
worth the hassle.

I did my own using an ordinary wood saw and a jig saw and filled any errors.
As its all black you have to look close to see the filling. Presumably the
edges aren't finally filled as even the good cut is clearly visible.

As for the short piece are you tiling round the worktop, mine had to be 2cm
small to get it in and the tiles covered the gap.


"rookie" wrote in message
ups.com...
After gutting my kitchen and doing the electrics, plumbing, plastering,
cabinet installation myself I weighed it up and decided it was worth
paying the money to have a professional fit my worktops. So I rang a
fitter advertised in the local paper (I wasn't able to get a
recommendation) and based on our conversation arranged for him to fit
worktops I'd already bought. They were fitted yesterday, but I'm far
from happy with the job. The mitred joints have a number of very minor
(such as 1x2mm) chips which to my eyes are really obvious, especially
since the worktops are a light grey colour and no seam fill was used in
the joint (just clear silicon).

The fitter did 2 joints (a u-shaped kitchen) and the latter is much
better than the first, although still not perfect. The latter joint I
told him to put some tape on the joint to try and avoid the chipping.
Unfortunately this was after a bad first attempt at it, so he ended up
taking 5mm off the length of the worktop and thus there's close to a
1cm gap at the end of the worktop where it ajoins the wall.

The fitter blames the chipping on the fact that they are cheap Ikea
worktops with an uncommon 'grained' surface. I'm thinking that it was
either an operator error with the router or a blunt router blade. What
do others think? Does anyone have any experience with cutting Ikea
worktops in general, or specifically the textured Aluminium effect
Numerar?

I'm kicking myself as I paid the fitter £180 for the work (for 2
joints plus 2 cutouts) yesterday as the joint didn't look too bad to my
eyes then. Also I agreed I'd apply some ColorFill seam filler and was
then happy that it would hide the chips. Now that I'm a bit more awake
today the joints look worse I'm not convinced the filler is going to
take and provide a long term solution befitting of the money spent on
the worktops and fitting. Does anyone have any experience with
repairing small chips with ColorFill?

Any general advice as to how to handle the situation would also be
appreciated.

For those interested photos available at:
http://www.geocities.com/neilbradburn/worktop/
Note: the coin in the picture is a 5p.

Thanks in advance for any input!

-Neil