Kitchen Progress

Yes it has been a while since I posted anything. Truth is there really was nothing worth talking about . And I am trying to be polite here .  So after a  few interruptions I got back to working on the kitchen .

I wanted to make the counter either side of the stove out of butcher block. I priced out buying some pre-made maple butcher block and it was ridiculously expensive and they only offered the one made up of 3/4 inch strips . I wanted the one with the wider 1 and 3/4 strips. So nothing to it but to make up my own .

So I bought a massive rock maple plank , seventeen inch wide X ten foot X two inches thick. Twenty eight board feet at $6.49 a BF.

Cut it in half

And ripped it up in to 2x2 inch strips on the table saw .

made a mess of strips

. . .  ran them through the planer

and cleaned them up

After ripping and planing I am down to fifteen inches wide, so I lost two inches over ten feet of length.
2" X 10' = 20 divided by 12 = 1.66 board feet, probably closer to 2 board feet if you account for the 1/4 inch thickness loss .

. . . all gone in a big pile of shavings

set up my bar clamps on the bench

and started spreading glue

 . . . and squeezed them all together . I actually made it up to be two sections eleven inches wide and one three and a half wide as my planer can only handle twelve inch width. And I knew I'd need to clean them up again to get all the unevenness out of the glue-up. Then after they dried overnight and I ran them back through the planer . . .

. . . . and then did a final glue-up and put the three big planks together. This way I only had two seams to clean up by hand . So after a massive amount of scraping and sanding with the belt sander and some trimming . . .

The final result after I hit it with some butcher block oil

This is the stuff I used to seal the wood . It is a food grade mineral oil with some waxes in it .

I also sanded and refinished both of the older butcher blocks I've had for years

and put them in place either side of the stove

Back at the beginning of June I did yank out the sink counter and pulled two layers of old 3/8 thick drywall . Rewired , and hung new drywall and got the old cabinets back in place . I made up a new temporary counter out of MDF with several coats of polyurethane to seal it well .

And got the fancy new under-mount sink and faucet installed

The cabinets will get new doors and a coat of paint next so I can put off building new cabinets for a while .

Just in case you think we are a bit spendy on all this kitchen remodel business, here is what our old sink looked like . I think we got all the life it  had out of it and then some . Note the multiple epoxy patches where the enamel had blown off .

Back in June before we were interrupted I also got the drywall mudded , and kitchen window trimmed . That's the first time in six years that we actually had trim on the window .

The Formica back splash above the stove is just a temporary set up with some remnants I had. For now it should keep the drywall from getting splattered with grease. The plan is to cover the entire stove side wall with stainless steel. I have some sheets that I salvaged from a metal fabricator's dumpster , I will need to figure out how to clean up and hang .