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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| The (almost) finished product |
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