This picture isn’t at all amusing

When we originally started to look at John Lewis of Hungerford’s Creme de la Creme reproduction of English Rose Kitchen they told us that their paint comes from the wonderful Fired Earth range, so for around a year we were convinced that Fired Earth was the place to go for our paint.

A few weeks back we finally got to Fired Earth in Holland Park. As we got near the end of Portland Road we saw a door in the most incredible vintage blue/green with a hint of pastel. Very hard to describe, but you’ll understand when I post the pictures.

Fired Earth just didn’t have quite what we were after, so we left a note through the beautiful door (it was Obama’s inauguration day and we could see the TV on inside so we didn’t like to intrude) explaining our situation and the owner was kind enough to call back the next day, saying that they had a pot of the paint left over that we could borrow to copy from.

Our fantastic contractor C, by the way, did a lot of research to find our who would give us the best deal on coating them. He found a body shop under the Westway that’s doing them right now – getting dents out and coating them with our chosen colour.

I can’t say enough good things about C. Only I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice to say that if anyone needs a recommendation I’ll put you in touch. Meanwhile, just because an article is a bi boring without any pictures, here’s a picture of the shower/steam room with the shower enclosure being built. Note that we actually have a floor in there now. Note also that this is a blog about our kitchen and I keep talking about the shower/steam room. Ho hum!

OK now that I have a few pieces it’s time to approach the stripping process. I accept that I’ll probably have to totally dismantle the units to do a proper job and I already know how hard that can be.

I’ve heard several suggestions as to how to strip the units back to the aluminium. They include sand blasting (but that dents the aluminium) media blasting (leaves the aluminium intact, but doesn’t remove rust) or some sort of chemical remover, for example Nitromorse.

The next thing will be what to do with it once the metal is exposed. I’m assuming it will start to oxidise again almost immediately, so either we need to duff it up in some way in preparation for painting, or polish it up and protect it somehow if we were to keep it nice and shiny aluminium. We know that’s possible because Source Antiques do it!

Anyway, I realise that a bit of Googling will reveal some of the answers which I will do, but I wanted to state the problem first and, of course, invite comment. So to some extent, over to you!