flat walls for kitchen

[Antony]

I'm nearing the stage of fitting a kitchen in our converted basement. Now we've got close to the job I have discovered the builder who did the dry walling has left us with bowed walls where I want to fit kitchen units and range cooker. The wall bows out with the middle nearest and a 1/2-3/4" gap at either end of a straight run of worktop or 1m-wide cooker.

Can folks suggest the pros and cons of solutions or let me know if I've missed something? It seems to me I have a few options:

1. Plaster the walls flat by adding a tapered/feathered layer of bonding then re-finish flat
2. Rip off the (newly-plastered) boards and adjust the battens to achieve a flattish wall, then re-plaster.
3. Mask the back of the cooker/worktop in some way so the gap can't be noticed, tho I still think this may leave tiling a non-starter.
4. Either of 1 or 2 plus billing the builder for correcting poor workmanship.

tia

Antony

[Rob Morley]

If you're fitting units above the worktop then you'll only need to re- board between worktop and units for most of the width. I'd be inclined to get the builder back to do it properly (actually I wouldn't have had a builder do it in the first place because I'm cheap).

[stuart noble]

You could chop out the high spot behind the worktop. Then, if your units/cooker are 1/2-3/4" less than 600mm, you might get away with it, for the lower part at least.

[The Natural Philosopher]

What I ended up doing was as follows.

(i) get the units as near to the bowed wall as possible.

(ii) slightly munge the worktop to get as near as possible to the wall.

(iii) put up the 'overtop' cupboards packing out where necessary.

(v) Infill between the cupboards and worktop with MDF on precisely sized battens to get it all square. This made running wires behind for sockets a complete doddle :-). It also made running a eal between them dead easy too.

(v) I still have the gap between the cpuboard tops and the wall, but its invisible. Expanding foam maybe? :-)

I was going to tile it, but ended up with emulsion paint. It looks great.