Another gift in our series of recipes shared by our multicultural staff at Smartpack. As promised we will publish another delicious homemde dish from around the world every  three to four months to interupt the flow of technical and design blog articles.

Kashmira is our production office manager and has been with the company for over ten years. Kashmira was born in Mumbai and was originally qualified as an interior designer. She has agreed to share this recipe with our blog followers and we at Smartpack custom kitchen and Smartpack Creativ hope you enjoy preparing and eating this typical Indian dish.

Peas Pullav

Rice with peas – Serve with plain yogurt

Ingredients

1 cup rice (Indian long grain basmati rice) rinsed, soaked for one hour & drained

1 cup frozen peas

1 medium sized potato cut into medium pieces

1 tsp each of cumin & coriander powder

2 cups water

½ cup finely chopped coriander

½ cup finely chopped chives

Juice of ½ a lemon

Whole Spices for Tempering

1 tbsp oil

1 tsp cumin seeds

½ piece of cinnamon stick

4 to 5 curry leaves

2 cloves

1 medium onion thinly sliced

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Finally Smartpack has published the new 2012 brochure designed by young graphic designer Jarmaine Stojanovic. 24 pages full of beautiful pictures of kitchens,wardrobes, laundries, home offices and storage. There is a minimum of text but an innovative legend depicting our wide range of finishes  and accessories. Click here to go to our download page for the new brochure.

On a recent visit to a South African game park called Mjejane I was impressed by a simply, hand finished door with a rustic finish.  The doors were made from Euro Oak veneer with a white liner laminate on the inside to give the doors a woodgrain background. A Victorian Ash or Tassie oak veneer can be used to give a straighter grain rather than the cathedral grain of the Euro or American Oak.

In the right surroundings and character of the modern rustic home, this door looks stunning and is all the more impressive when it is complemented by a suitable stone looking benchtop and tiled or glass splashback. The veneer door costs in the raw about $50-60 (730x 450mm approximately) and the finshing cost is your time and effort.

Hand staining is not difficult to do but does require some practice. Use some offcuts from your door cutting job to practice the staining and finishing.Our sister company Builders Bargain Centre does this type of work. The doors in the picture have been done using a brown stain, a very light sky blue and a white stain. The first stain is applied using the brown stain with a squeezed out rag so as not to apply too much stain at once. Do this in a streaky fashion over 80-90% of the door , then the blue stain over the brown and about 10-15% of the remaining area and then apply a white stain with a wetter rag to the whole door. The first brown stain will tend to absorb more and the subsequent stains will absorb less into the previously stained areas. The white gives the limed appearance to the door. Finish the door with a polyurethane in satin or matt or use a Tung oil like "Organoil" and then burnish the surface to give a warm finish. Practice this technique and apply the stains in your own balance of colours.

There is great creative satisfaction in knowing you have completed your own kitchen, study or wardrobe.

(download)

Click here to download:

rustic-finish-veneer-doors-that-you-can-do-yourself-tFqAjFrkdiEIwwlwoJkC.zip (15.24 MB)

The discerning client knows that there is a large discrepancy in the quality, style and look of the basic sliding wardrobe and a hidden track system that looks good but also closes silently and smoothly, like the door of an expensive car.

Creativ by Smartpack have now made this a reality using the Hettich Top Line 22 track system with soft closers. The wardrobe is a complete carcase which is totally customisable and can be made with 2 doors up to 2400mm wide by 2400mm high and with 4 doors to 4800mm wide.

The Hettich Innotech softclose drawers are used where drawers are requested and adds to the overall appeal of this sliding robe. The doors are 16mm gloss or velvet melamine with or without mirror or milky glass inserts or sprayed in polyurethane. The doors are 30mm off the floor and the track is invisible top and bottom when closed and no bottom track is visible inside the robe.

The installation of the track requires a tradesperson or carpenter or an experienced handy person or Creativ will do the installation for you.The wardrobe 2400mm wide has a price range of between $2500 and $6000 depending on options and door styles chosen.

Here is a video showing the operation of a Softclose wardrobe.

Click this link to go to the Custom Wardrobe page of our website

Happy New Year everybody. I thought - enough with the technical blogs for our Smartpack readers,  so, as a New Year gift, my wife has agreed to gift this recipe to all the followers of our Smartpack blog. If this proves popular then I will intersperse more of her recipes (and favourites from my mother) among the latest technical and interest articles every month.

A fantastic  pre-dinner snack with drinks served with rice crackers or ryvita biscuits. This will be a whole conversation by itself with your guests. 

Well enjoy and may the best of 2011 be the worst of 2012 for you all from the Smartpack team.

Newly launched Innotech Push to Open – and winner of the 2011 designEx New Bathroom Product of the Year – is the latest addition to Hettich’s renowned Innotech range featuring manual push to open technology and eliminating handles, for a sleek minimalist look. Great for bathrooms and entertainment units as well as kitchens.

One should note that soft close drawers are not available with soft close feature. The reason for this is that the two mechanisms have opposing springs and therefore do not operate together. The only option is to use the electronic push to open which has a small motor pushing out the drawer and then the soft close mechanism operates effectively on the drawer close. The downside of this perfect solution is the price tag of the electronic mechanism. It adds about $1200 for up to 4 drawer banks next to one another.

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In light of the Smartpack November special I thought our readers would be interested in some unbiased information about an induction cooktop.

Induction cooktops work via an electromagnetic field that essentially turns your cookware into an element by inducing a thermal electric current in the pot or pan causing it to heat up. Food is cooked by the heat of the cookware and not from the cooktop itself.

Benefits of induction cooking

Safer: There are no open flames and the air around the cookware is not heated other than by the cookware. The cooktop remains cooler to the touch than the traditional ceramic non induction cooktops. The only heat is from that from tranferance from the bottom of the cookware.In fact a piece of paper can be in between the cooktop and the cookware while cooking and it will not burn.

More efficient: Induction cooking can be precisely controlled compared to traditional electric elements and gas. Energy transfer in induction is about 84% , electric element 71% and gas 40%, which means there is a cost saving in power bill for the user. Induction cooking recognises the base of the cookware, directly heating only the diameter of the pot so very little energy is wasted.

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Sprayed doors
These doors go by a number of names such as two pack, polyurethane and  lacquered doors. These doors are made from MDF (medium density fibreboard) and sprayed with a chemically cured paint similar to car paint.Polyurethane is a better option than an a acid catylised lacquer and is much more resilient to solvents once fully cured. The faces and edges of the door can have a routered pattern or just plain faced with pencil round edges. The paint finish can range in gloss levels from matt(10%) , satin (30%), semi gloss (60%) to high gloss (90%).  The paint finish gives a very sleek modern appearance and shows no join seams on the edges. The paint is brittle but hard and can chip. The high gloss shows marks as does any highly polished surface. Semi gloss or satin finishes now more popular show less finger marks and are not so reflective. These doors are well suited to kitchen and bathroom installations. The price of a door 730mm x 450mm is between $85-150 per door depending on the routing and finish. The high gloss being at the more expensive end of the range. Smartpack offers a number of standard polyurethane doors  click here

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In time for spring we have remodelled our website. Check out our new site at www.smartpackkit.com.au

A new look, easier navigation and more ebooks and brochures for you to download together with our pricelists and 3D DYOS design program. It is also easier now to book an appointmennt for a measure and quote online in Sydney, ACT, Perth, Tennant Creek, Mildura and Mackay for the full custom kitchen, laundry and wardrobe installation service. We still make the premium flatpack system in Australia and we ship anywhere on the East Coast for $250 when the order is over $6000. 

The Smartpack online store is now much easier to use with no registration required and has products like drawer runners and hinges along with accessories for kitchen, laundry wardobes and home office. The best news is that we offer free shipping on the store for orders over $100 online.

So give the new site a whirl! click here