Finished Kitchen Remodel

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Jef

Let’s take a moment to let the above picture sink in. The lovely paneling. The yellow linoleum floor. The pencil sharpener. You see how those cabinets look like they lean in a little? That’s not a trick of the camera, they actually did lean in a little bit.

There isn’t much in the way of fast food on this island, so we cook a lot. Getting this kitchen fixed up was a huge priority, and it was also a huge undertaking.

Here we go, all finished.

Part of the challenge was having to use our kitchen while it was being worked on. As much as I wanted to gut the whole thing down to the studs and start fresh, that would have left us without a working kitchen for days at the very least, if not weeks. So, I ended up doing it the hard way, just a little bit at a time, as budgeting and timing permitted.

I like how the woodwork came out. The half wall cap looks really nice.

Definitely an improvement, anyway.

This used to be a wall covered with big boxy cabinets. And while the extra storage space was nice, it just made the kitchen look like the inside of a matchbox and, even worse, obstructed the view of the hockey game. That’s unacceptable in our house. We go to great lengths to be able to see hockey.

You can even see hockey as you walk in the side door.

The copper backsplash is one of my favorite additions to the kitchen. It adds some really beautiful color.

Lots of deep, island-y colors going on in our kitchen.

This is a pretty hard working spot, sometimes cooking two or three meals a day here. The wall mounted spice racks are pretty tight; I had a hard time determining what my twelve favorite spices are, and we had to fit in a thirteenth in there anyway.

Here’s our super clever trash can solution. It’s not as cool as it looks. In fact, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. But it works, and it keeps the trash can out of sight when you’re not using it, or right next to you when you need it.

Here’s a close up of the work I had to do to get the sink to fit. Those doors used to be inset, but I had to make them flush with the front surface. For the new gap in the middle, I just put some of that copper backsplash. Looks great.

The old countertops used to go all the way to the window, but we couldn’t do it that way this time because (1) the new countertops are thicker and the window would not be able to open or close, and (2) eventually that window is going to get replaced, and I can’t install a new window on top of the new contertops. So I just put a piece of wood back there. Quartersawn white oak, so it’s pretty stable, and it’s got a few coats of poly on it and some caulk in the joints but it’s otherwise floating and can be removed. I’m so clever, huh?

That banded trim piece up there was one meticulously cut piece of wood. It had to be carefully fitted to attach, all hand cut.

You could fill this sink up with water, put toy boats in it and have little pirate ship fights in there. The new sink is just HUGE! I put dirty dishes in it and I forget them because I never see them.

And Inky still has her catwalk up there, so she can get from the top of one cabinet to the other.

Still not my favorite cabinets, but with new hardware and a contrasting stain color they turned out alright.

It’s definitely come a long way.

It’s the detail work

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Jef

When I opened up the kitchen wall, I made this little half-wall between the kitchen and living room. I capped the half-wall with this 2×6 that I planed down and smoothed out and stained until it was passable. Nothing fancy, as you can see, which fits in well with this “nothing fancy” house. But now that the kitchen is getting a little fancier, I thought this piece might need to go.

The backsplash over the new countertop will be something pretty cool, so to replace this cap I wanted to use something nice. Hardwoods can be hard to find on this island, but I did find this piece of milled oak that was just long enough (seriously, within one inch) to do what I needed it to do.

Measurements are very carefully marked out before I start making sawdust out of it.

Making the band that goes around the edge is a little tricky, as the kind of banding I use in this house takes at least four passes over the router, and some of those oak 1×2’s were 12 feet long. My shop isn’t set up to rout lengths of wood that big, so I had to move the router table out into the middle of the garage, and carefully feed each piece through featherboards to clamp it down against the fence and the router bit securely. That length of wood tends to get a little springy and unwieldy unless it’s adequately supported, and I don’t have the bench length to do that… anyway, enough boring woodworker talk.

Too Long; Didn’t Read: It was a really tricky cut.

The successfully routed bands fit well against the cut cap.

Shaping the edge is a little tricky too. You can shape the length of it on the router, but against the grain it needs to be sawn by hand. However, since most of the routs are circular, I could use a drill to make those circular cuts against the grain, and then just cut it on the miter saw.

TL; DR: Another tricky cut.

I then clean up the edges by clamping two sides together to ensure symmetry. I use sharp scrapers, files, x-acto knives and a little bit of sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle cork. Got plenty of them laying around the shop.

TL; DR: Just stop reading and look at the pretty pictures.

Even after shaping the edge, each piece had to be further cut and fitted very precisely to fit along the wall nice and flush. The devil was in the details on this one, and she was one really mean devil.

This is a roll of 36 gauge copper. One side has been specially pigmented with an interesting pattern along its length. We’re going to use it for the backsplash. I told you we were doing something cool in here!

I had to lay this thing out on a nice flat board, some of the leftover birch from the cabinet extension project.

It cuts pretty easily. Once you get the cut going you can just pull a utility knife across it and slice it in a straight line.

Cutting the holes for the electrical outlets was also tricky.

So, a little contact cement, a lot of work with a roller, and some carefully cut trim pieces, and the copper backsplash is now installed! The copper is adding some very unique character to our kitchen and everything is coming together very nicely, even if we’re over budget and it’s taking several weeks longer than I wanted it to. Hey, this is our kitchen. We cook in here every day. I want it to be nice.

The new cap is installed and looks great.

I did take one shortcut in this whole kitchen. I didn’t move this electrical outlet, and just installed the trim banding over it. Call it laziness, call it what you will, but I took a quick look at that box in there and it was in such a tight space that I didn’t want to mess with it. So, I apologize to the future owners of this house, this kind of stuff drives me crazy too. But I’ve been busting my ass in this kitchen for weeks now and I have attained the point at which I just don’t care anymore. Be glad you can still plug two things into it, for I’ve seen worse in this house by whoever did the prior work.

And if you don’t think it looks cool, well, you’re in the wrong house. Go away.

Inky went to the beach, of all places.

The War Zone

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Jef

Okay, when your fridge and oven are in the dining room, it’s safe to say that your house has become a War Zone.

Yup. Cardboard taped to the floor, no countertops on the cabinets, nothing is where it’s supposed to be, nothing is in its place. Looking for the coffee? I think it’s over by the cat litter box.

Here’s the old countertops on their last day in the house. They didn’t put up much of a fight coming out, though the old backsplash had to be cut away with hand saws.

Yeah, we had no running water in the kitchen for a couple days while we waited for the new countertops. Well, the leaky hot water valve down there wouldn’t stop dripping, but that still doesn’t count as ‘running water’.

The old sink. May it rust in Hell.

I can’t say I like these cabinets, but resurfacing the doors and drawer fronts sure helped. New knobs, new hinges, new polyurethane, I guess I’ll keep them now.

And here’s the new countertops installed. It’s quartzite, which has a really nice texture and is very, very durable. You could smear grape jelly and red wine all over it and it would never stain. Oh, look, and the fridge is back in its correct place, too.

The new sink is HUGE. You could take a bath in that thing.

And now we have running water, and a fancy new faucet. I’m loving this sink. You can leave dirty dishes in it and it’s so deep that you never really see them. Out of sight, out of mind. Seriously, you could wash a goat in that sink. It’s huge.

I love the colors in this picture. The sky is bright, the water is reflective, the trees have many shades of green, and the houses and decks add little spots of their own color to the mix. You may notice our kitchen has a myriad of colors and textures, and not all of them really ‘go together’, and that’s quite deliberate. Living where we live, it really fits in.

The Cabinet Butcher

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Jef

The cabinets directly under the sink have recessed doors, so you can comfortably stand at the sink all day long washing dishes or doing laundry or performing whatever task Island Life has in mind for you, and there’s plenty of room for your knees and shins and feet. However, the new kitchen sink that we selected is too big to allow for this recess. There won’t be enough room to install it unless the cabinet doors are made flush with the front surface.

That’s where I come in. The Cabinet Butcher. I can take that recessed frame and reconstruct it so that the doors are flush and there is room for the sink, at the obvious expense of one’s comfort while standing there doing dishes. Since that’s usually me, well, who cares if I’m inconvenienced. We have a new sink to install, after all.

Now, the new configuration of the cabinet doors down there makes the opening wider, by a total of six inches. So, we need a strip of wood 6″ x 24″ to put in there between the doors. This is a pretty good opportunity to go down to a salvage store and find some odd scrap of carved wood that I can integrate into the cabinetry!

“Pick me!” squealed these two pieces. No, you’re both the wrong size, and you’re both ugly.

“Pick me! Pick me!” Okay, you’re the correct size but you’re still ugly. No dice. I’ll keep looking.

Yeah, well, while I ponder my newest conundrum, I must pry the remaining cabinet doors off their hinges so I can replace the hinges (with less-ugly hinges) and resurface them and stain them and make them pretty.

I did replace all the cabinet shelves with melamine. I’m no fan of melamine, but I am a fan of sanitary kitchens, and the melamine shelves were far cleaner than the greasy, sticky, cigarette-smoke infused cabinet shelves that we had.

Aprupt change of topics, but Inky is a mountain climber. Here she is atop a rock that’s about 30′ above the road below.

The Farmhouse Table

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Jef

We found an old dropleaf farm table at an antique store. It is rumored to be from Ireland. Or made by someone from Ireland. Or owned by someone who drank a lot of Bushmills. Anyway, we saw it and we had to have it.

Antique wood furniture can teach us a lot about woodworking. You can see exactly how things were made, and more importantly, how these techniques stood up to the test of time and use. What worked, and what didn’t.

In this case, it has taught me that we have been doing everything wrong. We spend so much time making sure everything is straight and flat, that table legs are plumb and solid, that pieces join at right angles. We cut tenons and mortises and dovetails, wasting precious time in a useless endeavor. We buy expensive table saw fences for accurate cuts, but there is no reason for them.

You see, all you need to do is split some lumber with an ax and nail it together with some tenpenny nails, and you’re done. That’s it.

Why make sure your table is flat? It doesn’t need to be. And is mortise and tenon joinery really superior to a few clipped-head steel nails? This table is like a hundred years old, and it’s still getting used.

Should you protect the surface from burning pots and pans? What the heck would you do that for? Just set the frying pan right down on the table, the wood will absorb the heat. No biggie. And if the legs get loose, just twist those screws a turn or so to tighten them.

And there’s always room for more nails, just pound them in!

And don’t bother finishing it to a nice flat even surface, when the pens of children doing homework will simply indent the table top with a strange cuneiform. This table is riddled with overlapping pen strokes, and it adds to the character. In fact, I think it even inflated the price a little bit.

The table legs are made out of oak, and judging by all those crisscross cuts were probably used to parry the broadswords of viking invaders. No effort was made to remove the splinters on the exit side of all those nails.

All I had to do was slather on some polyurethane, just trying to make it a little more sanitary, that’s all. This table is now in its final resting place.

You can’t get this at Restoration Hardware. No sir.

The Hodge Podge Lodge

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Jef

Here’s a picture of the kitchen countertop that came with the house.

See that? See that deep impact wound in the top of the kitchen countertops? That’s lovely, isn’t it? My best guess is that was caused by a tomahawk thrown by an angry indian at a prior owner of this house. But I really don’t know. All I know is we’ve been staring at that ax wound in our oh-so-lovely formica countertops (with the gold flecks that look like the bottom of a bottle of Goldschlager) for longer than I care to remember. And we want it gone. Is it possible to hate kitchen countertops? Yes, it is.

So, that’s the whole point of this exercise. Remove the existing countertops with a sledgehammer and a crowbar and maybe a tomahawk, extend the existing cabinetry, and install new countertops atop them.

Easier done than said, eh?

I made these platforms that will hold our trash bins. We can pull the trash bins out on the little (and rather expensive) drawer glides and they’ll be conveniently next to us ready to accept copious amounts of kitchen refuse while we cook. I have to admit, I have my doubts about this idea. It looks good on paper. We’ll see how well it does in practice.

If my cabinet burns down, this will be all that’s left.

And here is photographic proof that our house is rodent free. Because when I removed the drawers from the existing cabinets, in preparation for the install, I found this pile of spilt cat / dog / gerbil / whatever food, just waiting for the ravenous little fangs of rats and mice and other assorted vermin that can sneak into a house. The fact that this pile has sat undisturbed for at least four years is evidence enough that nothing comes into my house that would want to eat it.

And here they are installed. Yeah, it’s a hodge-podge of colors and textures, the red cabinet doors, the blue stools, the green floor. This house is a patchwork quilt, which is something you get when you live on Orcas.

I’ve got some plywood pinned on top temporarily, as it could be months before the new countertops are installed. Island time, you know.

It’s a Great Day to Make Sawdust

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Jef

It was a gray weekend outside. Nothing but rain, and more rain, and when that was done, it rained again. A nice day to get in the shop and make some sawdust.

All the pieces to make the kitchen cabinet extension are cut and ready to be put together. Here they are posing for a picture. Like a bunch of little jigsaw puzzle pieces.

These beams are going to hold the weight of a stone countertop, a portion of which will be cantilevered so we can put some stools there and have a new seating area. I over-engineered them deliberately, wanting them to be very, very strong.

Oh yeah, that will be a strong joint.

I assembled the base cabinet upside down, it was a little easier that way since I had these support rails that had to stay nice and flat with the top of the cabinet. In fact, I even made the joke “oh no, I glued it together upside down!”, acutely aware that no one else on Earth would get the humor but me.

And here it’s all fitted together. So far this project is going very well. I’ve screwed up very few things on it, and nothing I couldn’t fix, so I’m kind of anticipating some major catastrophe.

As much as I love Festool, it can be such a pain in the ass. I have to find a bunch of scrap pieces of wood to support the piece I’m cutting, as well as other scrap to support the rail, and then I have to clamp down the rail, and sand-bag down the other side since a clamp won’t fit, and I have to cut it in three passes since it’s such an acute angle and the wood is so thick that it would bind and try to explode if I just made one pass. And don’t even remind me about the stupid hose that keeps getting underfoot and trying to trip me.

But that’s what it takes to make brackets. A nice bracket is a complicated piece of wood that takes about a dozen precision cuts. When I have to make multiple brackets all the exact same shape, I make a template out of 1/4″ MDF so I can shape it and smooth it out on the router table.

I promised sawdust. And sawdust there shall be.

Several hours later I finally have nice brackets made and installed, slender enough to not be an eyesore and sturdy enough to hold a crap-ton of weight.

Really happy with the way this project is coming along so far. Well, I’m not happy with the pace, as this is taking forever and I still need to install hardware / make doors / make shelves / cut the back board / put on some trim pieces to conceal the plywood edges / find a way to carry this inside / hope it fits / install it / etc. But the overall quality of the cabinet, I am very happy with.

A Small House Abhors a Vacuum

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Jef

Small houses have to make good use of their spaces. The space in the pic up above just looks like it’s missing something. It’s a void, dead space, and small houses abhor a vacuum. You can fill the void with trash cans and cat food and old woodworking projects but is that really the best use of that space? Why don’t the kitchen countertops extend all the way down that wall? I don’t know why they didn’t just do it that way, but I also don’t know what used to be there when they originally built those cabinets. Maybe that’s where they put the washer and drier. Maybe they kept dead bodies there in boxes. I don’t know, but for some reason they didn’t see fit to build out the kitchen cabinets for more countertop space and more storage.

That’s where all this lumber comes in. I can use this to make more cabinetry in that space and then we can extend the kitchen countertop so it runs the full length of the wall. I got some solid planks of birch and a couple sheets of high grade birch plywood. Birch is the most boring wood on the planet. It is bereft of character, does not like to be stained, and as hardwoods go it is one of the softer ones. But the existing cabinets are birch and if I want to match them (part of me does, and part of me doesn’t) then I have to use boring ol’ birch.

I started with the base, so I have a nice foundation to set everything on. There will be three cabinet areas, two of which will house the garbage and recycling containers and one will be New Storage which we can put New Things into. That’s very exciting to me. And I’ve made these with room to sit at the countertop like a bar. It faces the tv, so you can grab some snacks and a cold beer and watch hockey all in one place. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

The wood chopped up readily enough. A little burning but I kind of have a crappy saw so that’s to be expected. My last project was made with 2×6 beams so it is nice to work with a wood that’s flat and square and doesn’t have a bunch of knots in it.

And here’s a really preliminary dry fit of all the pieces I’ve cut so far. It’s so important to me to fit everything together as soon as possible just so I can see the scale of it. Sometimes when you look at something in a live, 3 dimensional scale, you miss things that you didn’t see when you drew it on paper, and it really helps me figure out exactly how all this needs to come together and how the pieces need to be joined. I consider where the force goes, what holds weight, and what joints need to be stronger than others.

The existing cabinets were plywood boxes nailed together with solid wood frames pinned to the fronts and plywood doors. These will be similar, except that the joinery will be mortise and tenon on the solid frames and good fasteners instead of nails. I fully expect it to last longer than the house.

Pocket Doors, Part 2

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Jef

There are few things on this dirty, gray planet Earth that I love more than a finished project. The pocket doors are now done and installed and they will remain there until the End of Days.

They shut.

And they open too. Yay. All done. Okay, so I still have to do some little things like polyurethane and setting stops and making some adjustments so they close squarely and levelly, but hey, for all practical purposes they’re done and I can move on to the next thing.

The other pair of doors, depicted above, is on the opposite side of the room and can only be accessed by crawling under the desk. It may seem like a pain in the ass, and it is, and so was the install for that matter, but these eave storage areas are a pain in the ass no matter where the desk is. It’s just a good thing my desk is huge enough that you could park a volkswagen under it.

This project was pretty fun but it still takes a lot of time, and there were a lot of cuts to make and grooves to rout and holes to drill. Working with imperfect wood has its ups and downs. On the plus side, you get a raw and rustic look, which can fit in well in a little house on a small, remote island. And you can cheat a little, things don’t need to be dead flat and dead square and perfectly level. On the downside, it takes a bit more of an effort just to make sure it’s square enough and flat enough to work.

I was at first going to leave these holes open. They’re just storage area doors, I figured the ventilation would be beneficent. And then I had the horrific thought that someone could get their finger stuck in that hole, and if someone were to slam the door shut the result would be catastrophic (though on the bright side, the detached finger would fill the hole). Anyway, I decided to use wine bottle corks, just for safety reasons.

Cork can fill irregular holes really well because they’ll conform to its shape. All it takes is a mallet and some wood glue and maybe a little swearing. The ends can be sawn flush and sanded and they blend in very well. Not to mention that cork is very resilient and stronger than most people realize.

The panels I stained separately. The grain texture of the plywood panels is very different than the frame, so I deliberately made them a bit darker to give them some contrast. So it’s an ebony stain on the panels, and a different stain on the frame pieces.

It took hours to sand all those. I felt like I had sanded a tree.

Pocket Doors, Part 1

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Jef

Happy New Year. Let’s celebrate by making some sawdust.

There are still a lot of things I need to do for the loft renovation. One of them is to make pocket doors to access the little storage area in the eaves, since right now it’s just a hole in the wall that I’m getting sick of looking at. The doors are not going to be very big but they are in a highly visible part of the room, so I want them to look nice.

Remember the Hobbit Door I made a couple months ago? These are going to be made the same way: 2×6 frames, traditional joinery, and inset panels.

The lumber itself has been sitting out in the weather for a few weeks. Wish I could let it sit out there longer but these will have to do. I made sure to beat them up a bit too, to give them a real distressed look.

I made about 30 gallons of sawdust planing them down.

There are two storage areas and each one will have double pocket doors to maximize the size of the opening. Makes it a little easier to get things in and out or to go looking for something. The cut list for this project is pretty simple, as the doors are almost identical.

Once planed down they just need to be ripped to size.

Now that the boards are square, the router cuts a nice groove into it.

Groovy!

The tenoning jig is great when you need to cut the exact same tenon 48 times.

Construction lumber is rough and a little soft, but if you don’t want that Perfect look (which for this project, I do not) then it’s fairly forgiving.

It’s weird. Everything fit together very well on the first try. Usually I screw something up by now but so far so good.

Here they are, all assembled. There’s a little hardware that needs to be installed but other than that they just need to be sanded and glued and stained and finished. And installed.