Countertops

Now, in my last posting, I was talking about this island I built for the kitchen. Casters, cabinets, turkey, etc...

Truth be told, I suffer from a disease called, "shiny object syndrome." It's more common than you may think. We ended up cancelling school this week because of snow and ice. This left me with a week of time at the house with nothing to do but several dozen projects around the house. The obvious choice would be to work on the kitchen island, so naturally I attacked the bamboo in the back yard again.

Pre-Cutting

When we moved in, the bamboo was thick and slowly encroaching upon the lawn. I cut it back to the fence two years ago and it seems to have returned because of the bamboo behind the fence. My hope is that by cutting the bamboo in sub-freezing temperatures I might be able to kill it by freezing it. We'll find out soon enough.

Post-Cutting

If the freezing method doesn't work, I have a jug of concentrated Crossbow that might do the trick. I've read that it's essentially impossible to get rid of, but I need to try.

Okay, where were we? Oh year, kitchen island. 

Before I attached the new countertop, I had to build up the substructure so that I could attach some decorative molding to the outside edge. I used some 3/4" pine on edge that I cut to final thickness so that the substructure would be level enough to put the particleboard on.

Other than ripping stock on the radial saw in the garage, I did everything with hand tools. It ended up being faster to use a tenon saw and a bench hook than marking and walking to the garage to use the miter saw for every cut. 

One of the base cabinets, has two angles that would have proven to be tricky had it not been for a sliding t-bevel. (For any of my students reading this, the sliding t-bevel is the thing in the middle of the picture with the wood handle and the metal stabby thing on one end.)

After the corner section, it went pretty quickly.

If I had to do this again, I would have added some extra sub-structure between the two cabinets in the center, I think it would have made the panels line up a bit better.

Once that was done, I had to cut the panels to size and attach them. Attaching them was not all that bad. I had decided to chalk lines for the substructure to begin with but later decided that it was just a bit faster to just eyeball it and drive lots of nails. 

Unfortunately, the two panels used for the top didn't end up quite as perfectly flush as I had originally hoped. I had originally thought about using a belt sander to sand the ridge out, but ended up using a card scraper. It didn't originally occur to me to use the scraper, but I wanted to avoid getting too much dust in the kitchen.

The screws actually hold up a piece of pine underneath the panels. The seam had no support underneath so there was quite a sag, I fixed it with something out of the scrap bin. 

It turned out that the card scraper did the trick quite well and only took me five or six minutes to level the entire seam. 

Next was the scary part. I had about $170 into the laminate top and I knew that if I set it down on the top after the adhesive was down and it was done wrong, I'd be out that money and three days worth of time. With some careful planning and some help from Lucinda, it went well. The adhesive really "stings the nostrils" once the can is open. I worked as fast as I could, but it stank and it was inescapable. 

With the adhesive down, it was time to lay the laminate. It went down quite easily. I didn't have a "J-Roller" (I'm still not sure what one is, but Bob Vila says to use one.) so I ended up using the chamfered edge of a 2x4 that I had in the garage from a previous project and a lot of pressure. 

After some quick routing with the trim router, it was as done as it was going to get for a while. 

The (almost) finished product

Kitchen is Closer...

It's been long enough now, that I don't really remember where I left off. So I suppose we'll start with the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.

In anticipation of moving the pipes below, I cut out a section of drywall in the bathroom to expose the pipes from the back such that the plumber would be able to move the angles into the wall.

We wanted the pipes inside the wall as we're putting a cabinet where they are currently. The only problem with the plan was in my quest for somewhat perfection. In wanting the saw cuts to be straight, I attached a strip of plywood to the wall to act as a straightedge. Unfortunately, when I sank a screw into what I thought was a wall stud, I had in fact put it into a section of 3/4" copper pipe...which happened to be the main water intake for the house...with no valve between the hole and the street.

So after putting the screw back in so that it would slow the leak, I waltzed outside and shut off the main at the street...Lucinda called the plumber.

As it came to pass, the valve that was in the wall near the hole (among being a mess installed in 1965 the likes of which the plumber had never seen) prevented the plumber from an easy fix. He ended up having to cut out a section of pipe with a reciprocating saw and installing some pex and a couple of shark bites.

After this mishap, it would actually take about a week and a half to get the plumber back to the house. Apparently, he had other work to do...or something like that. In the mean time, we had the electrician to the house to do all of the work for the kitchen, this included:

• Moving a thermostat as well as the 220V power associated with the ceiling heat for the living room.
• Moving the overhead lighting switch for the kitchen to the other side of the room.
• Moving the electrical runs for the microwave and the range.
• Installing a new run to service the washer and an outlet next to the newly moved switch.
• Getting me to crawl around in my attic enough to bruise most of the front of my body and feel like I'd been in a street brawl for several days.

The highest point of our attic crawl space isn't actually tall enough to get a blue rubbermaid tub through if it's upright. I can barely be any higher than prone when I'm up there. Crawling 18 feet back and forth through it sucks, but it beats the crap out of paying the electrician to do it for me.

Okay, cue the plumber:

The left is with the drywall up in the kitchen. The right is before the drywall went up in the kitchen for the wall and the ceiling. If you notice, there are a few wires hanging down from the ceiling. That's right, when I pulled the crap down from the walls in the ceiling it took a bit more ceiling with it than I had hoped and I ended up exposing a section of the ceiling heat coils. What does that mean, Mr. Longo? It means that my life just got a whole lot less fun and a whole lot more work...ey.

Basically I have to slap mud up onto the ceiling and embed the coils into it. Then it's a game of mud, dry, mud, dry, mud, dry, until I've made up the almost 5/16" of mud that the coils were in to begin with so that the ceiling levels match. Boo.

Oh well, onto the island! We were told that if we were going to have a stationary island in the kitchen that building code said we would need to have a couple of outlets. As we didn't want to put in a post or try to trench in our cement slab foundation, we opted to not have a stationary island. Fortunately for us, the code doesn't apply to things on wheels!

I found locking, rubber wheeled, ball bearing, 125# casters on sale at Harbor Freight for $3/ea so I bought 12 figuring that if we were going to have more than 1500 pounds spread over the whole thing at some point that we may want to re-evaluate what we were doing with out lives.

For starters, I had to attach three cabinets together and build a sub base for them.

Now, the sub-base was needed as these are three upper cabinets that we were re-purposing as base cabinets. As the upper cabinets are shorter than base cabinets, I needed to build them up to match height with the two base cabinets we were using. As you can see above, I used some pressure treated 2x6 that I ripped down to final width on the radial saw and then simply attached it with screws. What you can't see are the casters that I added to the base. 

The casters weren't quite tall enough to just attach to the base of the cabinets, so I had to improvise. I found that the thickness of the 2x6 was just enough to get the caster to clear the sub-base, so I screwed two casters to a section of 2x6 and then attached that to the sub-base...instant fix. 

Once that was all done, I had something I could work with:

I attached casters to the larger base cabinets in the same fashion. The section of countertop you see on the far end of the island is from the original countertop. It went away. 

This is where I was essentially at Thanksgiving. We were able to share a wonderful meal with my Grandfather and his girlfriend who drove down from Renton, Washington. 

By the way, there were only five of us for dinner on Thanksgiving...the 16 pound turkey was more than sufficient.