Workers Of Wood

Installment 1:

My latest project has been a kitchen island. ‘Latest’ is a relative term, though. The truth is, it was installed just before last Christmas. But since the top is still not made (more on that later), I guess it counts as a current project. Here is the story:

My girlfriend’s (now my fiancé’s) house had an ‘L’ – shaped living and dining area, next to an enclosed kitchen. We wanted to create an open kitchen/living/dining area, with an island in the middle. The house has a truss roof, so we could get away with demo-ing the two kitchen walls, since they were not load-bearing.

This of course was a project that involved much more than the woodwork of building the island: In addition to the demolition, there was a lot of electrical work, since things like outlets and switches needed to get rerouted, and new service had to be run to the island. The kitchen had a not-very-beautiful laminate floor, and we decided to get rid of that, and put multicolored slate down instead. The entrance hallway in this 1961 house was multicolored slate, and we decided to extend it into the kitchen. Then there was the heating system. The existing kitchen had baseboard radiators along its two walls, with the piping running under the concrete slab. (The house was built slab on grade.) These radiators had to go, and the pipe on one end had to be re-routed to come up under the island, to allow for the kick space heater that went under the island. (The pipe on the other end of the radiators was in a perfect spot to be worked into the design and be under the island already.) Finally, the ceiling had to be patched in where the walls were removed, and then taped and painted. It was a big project, and I learned a lot doing it. Most of this work is outside the scope of this woodworking forum, so I will mostly stick to talking about the island.






The electrical box visible at the left end of the tile is a dedicated 20A circuit I ran for the island: down from the ceiling, through the wall to the left of the stove, and then chiseled into the slab. The flooring around the heating plumbing all had to be patched in. It is not regular parquet. It is something called K-block, and was typical of the floors put in around the time this house was built. It was a bit difficult to find, but I finally found a supplier in the Bronx.

We had a fun time getting the slate. We actually drove up to the quarry in Vermont to pick it up from the source. There is something like a 30-mile-long by 3-mile-wide belt of colored slate that straddles the New York/Vermont border, and this is where all of the stuff come from. Jana (fiance) found a place that wholesales the stuff, and sweet-talked her way into letting us go there to pick up enough for the kitchen. It really is beautiful, with subtle differences in color and shade in each tile.



That is all for now. Tomorrow, I promise I will actually discuss woodwork. I just wanted to get the background in first.

Alex

Very professional, Alex...love the slate. I've been on that road (Rte 30?) between Lake George and Manchester with the quarries and beautiful slate...tough to resist. Sounds like you had a great trip.

Anxious to see the island project...

And it looks like you've got a good handle navigating the forum...

Nice job Alex. On the old forum many of us belonged to we often had discussion about various construction issues. Quite a few of the members had some expertise in that area with some of the members being retired contractors. I don't see why we can't have those discussions here too.

Installment 2:

Design
To begin to establish the basic shape of the countertop, we taped together a few pieces of brown flooring paper, then folded it into a rectangle in the approximate size of the countertop we wanted, then laid it on the floor. This way, we could play with different sizes to figure out clearances to the fridge and to the sink counter, and to visualize how much room the island and countertop would take up on the living room side of things. We knew that we wanted an overhang on the living room side to put stools under, and that the island had to line up with the left edge of the cabinet below the cooktop.

With the size of the top established, everything else followed. I subtracted for the overhangs on all four sides, and so had my cabinet dimensions. After that, we were able to figure out what we could fit in there. We wanted drawers, a place for the microwave, open storage for pots, and pull-out garbage and recycling bins.

We also wanted lots of electrical outlets, both for appliances and for things like phone chargers. There is no plumbing to the island (other than for the heating).

The island itself is about 24” wide. A microwave is considerably less than that in depth. Since putting a microwave below the countertop would leave a fair amount of dead space behind the microwave, we decided to put that wasted space to use. I put a false back behind the microwave, and then put in a pair of small flush doors on the living room side, that open with push latches. (See pictures.) This way, there are two 9” shelves accessible from the living room. It is an out-of-the-way place to store things like fancy glassware.

(If I am taking a lot of time discussing the design process, that is because, in a Facebook woodworking group that I belonged to for a short while, I saw so many requests for plans. It seemed that a lot of people wanted suggestions and help in the design process. Forgive me if I am going on too long about this.)



Tomorrow, I will write up some of the construction details.

Alex

Vary nice, Alex...and excellent writeup.

Interestingly enough, I followed the same process for the island I built...size the top to the space it was going to live in, then the overhang finally the cabinet.

Have no fear about your writeup and the entire design and construction...it is very much welcome here...creates good discussion...

Installment 3:

Construction began with the back piece. After joining two pieces of plywood for it (since I wanted a 68” wide piece with vertical grain), I did the final layout of verticals, doors, and shelves on the inside of this piece. I drew these right onto the back – it’s harder to make an error that way. I then cut and edged the opening for the ‘hidden’ cabinet behind the microwave. (I cut up a bunch of ¼”x 7/8” maple strips to use for all the edging. Its color pretty much matches the birch plywood I used.) I also edged the side pieces (living room edge only, since this will show; the other edge is behind a face frame), and the microwave shelf at this time.






Once the back was done, I assembled it to the sides, bottom, and the two top stretchers. I put in the verticals and then fitted the face frame. I did not make the frame as a separate unit and then attach it. I put it on piece by piece, using biscuits to the plywood edges and, at the joints, diagonal screws from underneath. I did this primarily because of limited space in my small basement shop - the island was already taking up all of my assembly table.





I added the ‘false back’ behind the microwave, and put in a shelf in the middle of the space created in the rear. For the two small doors, I used the piece that I had cut out of the back, because I wanted to maintain the grain pattern. I cut it into two doors, edged them, and used self-closing hinges and push latches.







I made the drawers from ½” Baltic birch plywood, and dovetailed them with a jig. It is possible to dovetail plywood using a jig, but you need to take some precautions against tear-out. You need a new, sharp bit, and you have to put masking tape on the edges to keep things from splintering.


I used Rev-A-Shelf self-closing hardware for the waste bin pull-out. It is a bit expensive (around US $150, if I remember correctly), but is good quality and works well. I put one of these into a friend’s kitchen 5 years ago, and it is still works like brand new. For the drawers, I used Blum undermount soft close slides. Again, they are not cheap (around US $33/pair), but they work beautifully, and are invisible.







We found drawer pulls that were almost an exact match for the existing ones in the kitchen.




Tomorrow: Finishing and installation

Very methodical...All glue construction...? I don't see any pocket holes...

Which glue did you use...?

I used biscuits for the case construction. I used screws along with biscuits where I could get away with them: screwing the verticals from the top and bottom, and screwing the microwave shelf from the (interior) sides. The face frames were biscuited into the plywood edges in the front. It took a bit of jigging up, because the plywood is 3/4", and the face frames are 1 1/2" wide. But it wasn't too difficult. I did put screws in, at an angle from underneath, to hold the horizontal to vertical face frame joints together (see picture). The two vertical face frame pieces in the middle were simply screwed straight in from above and below.

I used Titebond throughout (maybe it was Titebond II.)



Alex

Alex wrote: ↑Sun Dec 06, 2020 1:33 pm I used biscuits for the case construction. I used screws along with biscuits where I could get away with them: screwing the verticals from the top and bottom, and screwing the microwave shelf from the (interior) sides. The face frames were biscuited into the plywood edges in the front. It took a bit of jigging up, because the plywood is 3/4", and the face frames are 1 1/2" wide. But it wasn't too difficult. I did put screws in, at an angle from underneath, to hold the horizontal to vertical face frame joints together (see picture). The two vertical face frame pieces in the middle were simply screwed straight in from above and below.

I used Titebond throughout (maybe it was Titebond II.)


Face frame screw.jpg



Alex

Nicely hidden...!

Installment 4:

Finishing
We wanted a finish that would match the existing cabinets. I used birch plywood. When they gave me the sheets at the lumberyard, I saw that they had brown ‘flames’ on them. I was going to decline them, but then I thought that this would make an interesting detail.

As for the finish, I tried as best I could to match the nearly 60-year-old patina of the existing cabinets. To this end I bought a small can of every Minwax stain that looked remotely close, and did a lot of experimenting. When I thought I had it, I sanded to 120 and stained the whole thing, then gave it three coats of semi-gloss polyurethane, giving it a light sanding with 320 sandpaper between coats. After the final coat was dry, I rubbed it down with #0000 steel wool. I still haven’t gotten around to waxing it, because something in me wants to give it one more coat of poly.

The drawer boxes got three coats of water-based polyurethane. I went with this because we did not want to make them too yellowish.

Installation
Under the cabinet, I put in a kickspace heater. These things are great! It uses little energy, and really pumps out heat. When the furnace is running and hot water is flowing through the coil, a thermostat switch starts the fan, and a stream of warm air shoots across the kitchen floor and rises upwards. To allow for cleaning and service, I had to put a removable panel in the bottom open shelf in the middle of the island.


The countertop overhangs just over 12” on the living room side, for stools to go under there. It was a bit of an engineering challenge in trying to figure out how to support this. (Think of all the elbows that will lean on the countertop over the years.) I needed some large and strong right angle brackets, but I obviously couldn’t just bolt them to the outside. Screwing them to the inside would not be a viable solution either, because I would not be able to use more than a 5/8” screw - or it would poke through the back - and this would not be enough to counteract all that elbow leverage.

The solution I came up with was to make wooden braces for the angle brackets to fit into, and get securely bolted to. These braces, in turn, would get screwed and glued to the inside of the back. (A bit of countersinking was necessary for the heads of the bolts, on the inside of the back panel.) An issue, though, was that to get the best possible spacing for the angle brackets, each bracket needed to be mounted as close as possible to an inside corner. That meant that I could screw through the wooden bracket only on one side of the iron L; on the other side, the L butted right into the corner. To remedy this, I added a second piece of wood, screwed and glued in the corner at 90 degrees to the bracket assembly, to support that side of things.

I hope that this will all make sense when you look at the pictures.









It has been nearly a year now, and the island still has a temporary plywood countertop. Jana has found some retro-styled Formica that will go perfectly with the vintage of the house. It is limited run stuff, though, and rather expensive, so we have not pulled the trigger on that yet. Probably we will do it in the spring, when I can do the laminating in the driveway and not have to worry about fumes.



Alex