Julian Cassell's DIY Blog

Charcoal cooker hood filters are used to help remove the odours from cooking fumes in your kitchen. They are essential requirements if you have the type of cooker hood extractor fan that is known as a recirculating fan, because it doesn’t vent cooker fumes through a hole in the wall directly to the outside. Instead, cooking fumes are sucked up into the hood, passed through the charcoal filters, before being circulated back into the kitchen as fresh air. read more »

Zinsser BIN is a primer sealer that I feel outshines all ‘equivalent’ products on the market because it has so many applications, and can solve so many problems in all manner of decorating projects around your home. It has come across the pond from the US (along with so many other great decorating products!), and after I first became aware of it, maybe 10 or so years ago, it has become a stock item in my decorating supplies. In this guide I’ll explain a little more about what makes Zinsser BIN special, and a few areas of decorating where I find it to be an invaluable aid. read more »

Hanging kitchen units on stud walls offers a small problem when fitting a kitchen as you need to ensure that you adequately support the weight of the wall units. Yes, you have the vertical studs, but the chances of them coinciding with the required unit fixing points is pretty small, and simply relying on hollow wall fixings for the areas in between studs, really is not an option. The following sequence shows a technique that will ensure you get strong fixing points, read more »

Deciding which kitchen worktop oil to use is always a hot topic on DIY forums, with discussions normally providing plenty of conflicting advice covering everything from product preferences, to number of coats, to application methods. As a result of all these differing ideas and options, I would imagine that most readers leave the forum more confused than ever, and still concerned about what the best options actually are. Well for me, there is one product out there that far outperforms all the other options read more »

Planning a kitchen really does need to be an operation of almost military precision because there are so many things to think about, and therefore so many things that can go wrong. However, the result of good kitchen planning is right up near the top of what I would call the ‘Home Improvement Project Gratification List’. read more »