more about cabinets

there hasn’t been too much new stuff to post because… we’re STILL working away on the cabinets (here’s the first installment about cabinets). I’m still enjoying it, though it just seems to go on and on and on… Cabinetry demands an insane level of precision, and if anything is off by one thirty-second of an inch, then it’s got to be redone. (that’s 0.03125 inches!) I think Mike is kinda over it, but I’m enjoying the adventure, and I hope Richard is too. Anyway, since we’re spending so much time on this, I thought I’d add more detail about what we’re doing.

left: cabinet case plans and plywood cut plans for under-sink cabient; right: cabinet face plans for drawers

The cabinet cases are the easiest part. We’re using nice quality birch plywood here, which comes in 4′ x 8′ sheets. We’ve drawn up plans and cut lists so I check the plans and measure out (very carefully) where to make the cuts. Richard got a cool Festool circular saw that runs along a little track, which makes impressively straight, neat, accurate cuts and is very handy and portable. We use about one sheet of plywood per cabinet, depending on dimensions. Richard has built a wonderfully handy “cutting table” just for this purpose; it’s a criss-crossed grid of scrap wood that gets nibbled into by the saw with every cut; it’s big enough to support the 4×8 sheets of plywood but it’s also easily collapsible and can be packed away when we’re done with this project.

a grid of scrap wood on top of sawhorses – perfect for cutting up big sheets of plywood. At the far end, our cabinet-making jig is sitting atop the super-flat work surface.

Richard also built a super-flat work surface that we use to do our joinery. The level of precision required for cabinets makes you realize that there is no truly flat surface anywhere in the workshop! The poured concrete floor is wavy, the tables are all slanted, nothing’s truly, entirely flat when you really need it to be perfect! We also made up some right-angle jigs that we use for clamping the cut pieces together at a (hopefully) perfect right angle while we join them. So, once the pieces are neatly cut, we move onto the flat surface and start cutting the biscuit slots with our new biscuit joiner. It’s a nifty little device that cuts little slots into the edges of the plywood, then you use flat little discs of compressed wood fiber to fit the pieces neatly together. It’s a super easy quick joint, though we’ve discovered it’s not the most precise method of joinery, and because it requires wood glue to hold the joint, it’s unfortunately impossible to back up and make adjustments if something doesn’t come out quite perfect. So we only use the biscuit joiner for the rougher work on the cabinet case. We also use pocket screws, in addition to the biscuit joints, which basically act as clamps to hold the joints steady while the glue dries, and just adds additional strength to the joints. For a 31.5″ long joint, we use about four biscuit slots and three pocket screws. This is my only photo (I’ve already posted this one previously, sorry!) showing the assembly of the cabinet cases:

cabinet sides are clamped to a right-angle jig while we glue the biscuit joints and screw in the pocket screws

The most challenging part of the cases is attempting to get everything put together at right angles. It turns out the plywood, while less prone to warping than solid wood (because of the alternating layers of wood with criss-crossed grain direction), still does warp, and that makes it pretty hard to get everything square, when each supposedly flat sheets has its own twisty, warpy, independent will! But we do the best we can.

Once the cabinet case is all done, then comes the face frame. This part requires more precision; for the cabinets with doors it’s got to be quite precise, so that the doors can swing open and shut without jamming or catching; and for the cabinets with drawers it has to be even more exact! We use solid beech wood for the face frames, .75″ thick by 1.5″ wide. Richard found that the 1.5″ stock available at the lumber store was awfully twisted and warpy, so we ended up buying 4″ wide boards (which just happened to be significantly straighter) and slicing every board in half on the band saw, then hand-planing them down to the perfect thickness. I’m learning how to use a plane and I think I’m getting better at it! It’s very easy to make things quite crooked with a hand plane; making them not-crooked is the challenge. We use a coarser plane first, then a finer plane for fine adjustments, a pair of calipers to make sure the thickness is correct (to within a sixteenth of an inch) and a little square to make sure the planed edges are square and flat.

hand-planing the cabinet face stock

Next step is using the mitre saw to cut these pieces to length. This has been problematic; our miter saw is supposed to be able to cut a perfect right-angle but the results have been unpredictable and we’ve struggled a lot to try and get the saw working with the level of precision we need. This weekend Richard just built another new jig that we hope will let us hand-plane the ends of the wood to achieve a perfectly square end.

Here are all the pieces of a cabinet face, some finished and some un-trimmed.

cabinet face under construction

Once the pieces are cut to size, we use a pocket-screw jig to pre-drill the screw holes. It’s a special kind of technique that screws the pieces together at an angle, going in from the backside. As long as your pieces are cut quite square, it’s a very easy joint to make. The result is a beautifully perfect joint without any screw heads or holes visible from the exterior!

pocket screw jig

angled holes for pocket screws

Here’s a finished cabinet face!

Again, we use pocket screws to attach the finished face frame to the cabinet case. Then comes the drawers and drawer slides! So far, Richard has been working on the drawer construction while we work on the other stuff. He’s been using a pinned rabbet joint with beautiful wooden pegs to construct the drawers. Then the drawer slides – I think this is the most difficult part of all! However crooked or out-of-alignment the cabinet construction is, Richard has to make up the difference by custom-fitting each drawer slide to compensate for the irregularity. We could’ve saved a lot of time by using metal hardware for the drawer slides, but we thought it would be a fun challenge, and a beautiful result, to do this with all wood, no hardware.

left: screwing the cabinet face onto the case. right: Richard adjusts the fit of a drawer.

all-wood drawer sliders and homemade drawer stop mechanism

It means the sides of the drawers are clean looking, without metal slider tracks down the side, and it also means we maximize the usable drawer space – no storage area is lost to metal runners. It also means the runners have to be totally perfect to ensure the drawers slide smoothly – nothing worse than a drawer that gets stuck half-way open or shut. We apply a special wax on the wooden runners to make them slide nicely, and the finished function is absolutely great, even with a heavy drawer filled with silverware! Once the slides are all set, Richard planes down the drawer faces to fit perfectly. They’re cut slightly oversized to allow us to trim them to compensate for any slight imperfections in the construction of the cabinet face frame. Then, when all the woodworking is finally done, we sand the faces and give them two coats of primer and three coats of green paint, then tidy little wooden knobs. Here’s our finished drawers in use in the kitchen:

beautiful pinned rabbet joints. homemade drawers, hard at work in the kitchen!

The whole project has been kind of huge and exciting – it would have been a lot easier to buy ready-made cabinets, but I think we’ve saved some real money by doing it ourselves, and the result is SO beautiful, I am so totally delighted with the results and overflowing with pride every time I stop to take a good look at our cabinets! I feel like they really look so special and so much nicer than the average, and so perfect for us and our kitchen! So, how much more do we have left to go? We’ve got four cabinets completed and installed in the kitchen, two with doors and two with drawers. We’ve got another cabinet box and face complete on the workbench but lacking the drawers. Once we finish that one, we’ll need to do two more cabinets and that’s it! Then we can start working on the upper shelves, which Richard promises will be much easier! Here’s hoping it’s true! I can’t wait…

kitchen progress

here are some newer photos of the kitchen becoming more kitcheny and inhabited.

feels like things have been moving slowly here, but we have been plugging away on the cabinets, bit by bit. Actually Richard is putting in a lot of hours on the cabinets – he’s building the drawers and we’re supposed to be doing the cabinet cases but we’ve fallen behind a bit. Tomorrow I will hopefully put in some good long hours in the workshop and get caught up!

working on cabinets

for the first set of drawers, Richard experimented with different construction techniques, each of these drawers is a bit different! We weren’t sure whether it would work to use wooden runners and forego the metal hardware. The benefit of runners is that they make your drawers move smoothly and easily (even if the drawer construction is a bit imprecise or imperfect); the drawbacks are that they’re kind of ugly, they’re kind of expensive and they reduce the size of the drawer. We talked it over and we really just love the simplicity and integrity of all-wood construction, without the ugly modern metal hardware, and since we’ve got Richard’s expert skills and we’re not mass-producing this stuff, we can attempt to make all of our drawers so tidy and perfect that they will slide easily on wooden runners without wheels. You can put a bit of special wax on the wooden runners to help the drawers slide more easily.

Judy and Paprika celebrating our new cabinets!

Here’s the first set of drawers, installed next to the beautiful sink cabinet! We did load up those drawers with heavy silverware and dishes and they still slide quite nicely. In this picture we had mis-matching drawer knobs on the drawers; we’ve since changed them all to the smaller size which looks much better! I ought to post a more recent photo here but the kitchen is a total mess at the moment so it’ll have to wait. Now that we’ve got the stove and sink installed and everything, I am so absolutely chuffed that I can finally COOK again, for real! It’s been almost a year since I had my own kitchen to cook in!! So I’ve been baking a bit, and really obsessed with making fruit smoothies every morning (I know that doesn’t sound like cooking, but when you have no countertops to cut on or sink to rinse fruits and clean up, it’s just not that easy to chop up fruits every morning!), and on a total pizza-making kick. We got a bread machine at a yardsale last year and I finally dusted it off and tried it out, it makes up some delicious pizza dough for me to play with. In general I feel like I’m just wildly appreciative of some really basic kitchen pleasures and amenities that one would ordinarily take for granted.

hooray for cooking again

exciting kitchen progress

here’s the finished sink cabinet

now we’ve got the first cabinet box done, we get to really start moving in, and install our beautiful countertop and sink!! Mike unpacked our lovely cherry butcherblock countertop and started giving it a tung-oil treatment that should protect it against water and stains and stuff. Basically just painting on lots of oil and then rubbing it off with a rag a few minutes later and repeat once a day for a few days.

before and after – the tung oil really changes the color.

Then we had to do a bit of work to get the sink ready. Because it was an old salvaged sink (from Pete’s Place in Hollis), we had to use a wire brush to scrub off some rust from the bottom side and then paint over it with some smelly white rust-oleum type stuff.

salvaged sink took a bit of repair work before using.

Then dropped the counter into place and trimmed the edges/corners to fit snugly against our not-straight kitchen wall, then cut out the hole to fit the sink in.

cutting the sink hole into the countertop

And then… the sink goes in! hooray!!!

this is the old faucet, we have a slightly nicer one that we’re going to replace it with

Now we just need to get the sink hooked up and we’ll have a real kitchen!! We dragged in the fridge too, and Mike sealed and finished the counters. Cooking dinner is SO much easier and funner now, and it’s going to be such a delight when the sink is working too.

whoo! we’re on our way

cabinets

We had a tough time deciding what to do for cabinets. Thought about rescuing/restoring the old ones we found in one of the ruined apartments in our ell, but those were in bad shape, and kind of cheap and depressing to begin with. I did a bit of shopping around to mass-market cabinet places, home depot etc, and found absolutely all of the new cabinets to be really ugly and way too expensive. So, because we’re crazy, we decided to BUILD OUR OWN CABINETS instead! As if we didn’t have enough projects to work on.

starting the kitchen cabinets in my dad’s workshop

My dad is a very handy carpenter and has a nicely fitted-out woodworking shop that is just perfect for such a project. We set to reading all kinds of books and articles about cabinetry. Richard has a very organized collection of woodworking magazines that have advice and project directions and everything, and Mike got us some exhaustively detailed DIY cabinetry books. It was all kind of dizzying and overwhelming to me, but Richard is really in his element here, and he managed to sort out all the options and explain most of it to us. We now know the difference between dadoes and rabbets, pocket screws and biscuit joints, plywood and laminates, shaker style cabinets, colonial, modern, european, etc etc! Richard got to buy some fun new tools for his shop, and jumped right in to experimenting with different materials and joinery. We figured out what seemed like the easiest and most attractive construction, a super-simple shaker style cabinet with pocket screws and biscuit joints.

Richard and Mike at work on the first cabinet

It took us about a full weekend’s worth of work to get the first one, the under-sink cabinet put together. A lot of setting up workstations and jigs, drawing plans, spatial thinking and painstaking carefulness. I never could attain this degree of carefulness on my own, but that’s where Richard is helpful, he’s absoultely meticulous, as a carpenter should be.

cabinet plans, clamping everything

This project has honestly been one of the funnest parts of the whole house so far, it’s really exciting so far and it’s been so great to spend time in the shop with Richard, learning new stuff and making this amazingly beautiful and tidy thing. Hopefully it will be just as fun to finish the cabinets – we’ve only just begun, lots more work to go!

mike drills in pocket screws for our first cabinet! This is the under sink cabinet on the workbench in my dad’s woodshop.

kitchen walls

We took a big plunge and decided to hire a few contractors to help us get the kitchen up and running. We still want to try and do most everything ourselves, but it felt like a week or two of hired help could help us get a huge kick-start on the kitchen, just to get to the point where we can survive through the winter in here. Consulted our budget (ie. how much money we can borrow from my parents) and decided we could (just barely) afford to hire some help from a carpenter and a plasterer, to get the kitchen walls finished up quickly so we can move on to installing cabinets, counter, sink, all the good stuff! My dad had recently bumped into on old acquaintance named Lynn, a master carpenter who happened to be looking for new projects. And my sister Alicia recommended a plasterer friend, Laura, who had done some good work in their house and could help us whip up some kitchen walls. So we made some phone calls and… Voilà! December began with a house full of skilled tradesmen working away in our house. Lynn and Laura working on the kitchen while Nate and his helper worked away on the bathroom plumbing and basement drainpipes. We can’t afford to have them do a whole lot of work, but they can quickly get a lot of basics finished and get us further along the road! It was weird and fun to spend a few weeks with a crowd of workers in the house, we had to try and stay out of their way so they could work, and I was almost constantly employed in answering zillions of questions about “will you want to put some molding here” or “how do you want this wall to meet the ceiling” or “where should this pipe run” or “can I rip this out” or “should we plaster over this or go around it” etc etc! There were so many questions that we hadn’t thought about – it’s like a full time job just figuring out how to orchestrate and direct the contractors. At night when everybody had gone home, we’d drag two chairs into the empty kitchen and sit by the woodstove eating dinner on our laps, then in the morning we’d have to wake up super early to clear away everything from the kitchen again, drag the chairs and everything out of the worksite and start up the woodstove so it would start to get warm by the time everyone turned up for work. Then once it started snowing we had to clear and sand the driveway every morning so the work vans could get up the driveway. Mike had to stay in the bedroom to work most days, since his workday is filled with conference calls, can’t really do that in the middle of a construction site. The puppy made friends with all of the contractors and clambered all over them while they worked and tried to steal their lunches every day, but had to be locked up in the bedroom with Mike most of the time, or else she certainly would have chopped off the end of her pretty little nosy snout by getting it too close to a sawzall or a drill.

Lynn’s work in the kitchen was mostly getting everything totally finalized and prepared for hanging wallboard – in an old house, no walls are straight, no two wall segments line up quite properly, no doorway is straight, no two pieces of wood are on the same plane. There’s an infinite amount of little discrepancies to be evened out and tidied up. With a plane and impressive speed and skill, Lynn straightened out our doorways, replaced missing studs, missing bits of strapping, made walls level and plane and square, furred-out short bits and sawed off other bits, took out old broken wood and replaced it with new strong wood. We’d done our best to do the pre-wallboard preparation ourselves, but it was remarkable to see how many things we’d missed!

1-inch insulation and strapping on the ceiling, all ready to hang blueboard.

Then Laura and Rick hung blueboard all over. Blueboard is a special wallboard that’s intended for plastering over. Here’s what the kitchen looked like with all the wallboard up – what a dramatic difference!

all done with insulating, now the blueboard is up, and all is ready to plaster!

Work got slowed down with Christmas and then a big snowstorm. Just before New Years, Laura and Rick started to put up the plaster, and finished up in the first week of the new year. The plaster is kind of a mysterious and magical thing. It starts as soup and ends up as rock-hard walls. They had a bit of a struggle to work on the ceiling and walls above our woodstove, as it’s blazing hot and dry up there, and the plaster needs to complete a chemical hardening process before all the water evaporates out of it. We had to spritz the walls lightly with a spray bottle for an hour or two after they finished, to make sure it didn’t dry out too quickly.

all done with plaster!

Laura grew up learning plastering from her father and her grandfather, who were plasterers too. She said when she was just little, she would do the bottom of the walls while her father and grandfather worked on the top part. These days plastering is much less common, most people just do wallboard now, but it works really well for an old, crooked house – it fits with the history of the house, and works nicely up against the exposed beams and it helps to fill in some odd gaps and smooth over some of the irregularities.

Back when we were in the destruction and gutting phase, we found this beautiful huge beam when we ripped out the old wall by the chimney. We’d originally imagined having cabinets along this wall, but then it seemed like a shame to cover up this amazing beam, so in the end we took a few days trying to figure out whether it made sense to do some carpentry and plaster magic to keep it exposed, or just cover it over for the sake of getting work done more quickly. In the end we decided to take the time to expose it and we are really happy with how it looks now!!

before and after.

Historically speaking, this kind of exposed beams are not at all authentic, it has a fun old-timey look but the original house never would’ve had its beams showing like this. We think it looks cool anyway!

priming the kitchen walls

So… early January and we’re ready to paint the walls! This felt like such a huge exciting milestone and we were SO pumped to get started!! but turned into a huge job because the fresh plaster absorbs a TON of paint. It took something like six gallons of primer to cover the whole kitchen. I also had to tape off and mask off ALL of those precious exposed beams, a hellishly tedious process that involved balancing on top of a ladder, sweating in the heat and weirdly contorted to reach the beams overhead, carefully taping along the edges of every beam while wood splinters fall down in my eyes.

taping the ceiling for painting is really annoying

color deliberations, part one

We went through some lengthy indecision about colors, we tested EIGHT different color swatches and ended up liking this light-blue color.

benjamin moore, yarmouth blue

judy helps with painting

kitchen inspiration

we’ve been thinking hard about how to put the kitchen together… we realized that we both really aren’t into the look of a bank of store-bought cabinets, thinking about open shelving instead, not sure what to do under the counter. So anyway we came across this photo that we both love. Of course our kitchen doesn’t have brick walls, and luckily we do have big windows and lots of light, but anyway, i just dig the open shelves and the way a large open kitchen space becomes cozy and simultaneously tidily organized and informal. They have an island too, just like we’re going to. No idea where this image came from. Anyway now I want all those orange (red?) pots and pans!

insulating the kitchen

Sustainable Solutions

we hired Sustainable Structures to blow in dense pack cellulose fiber insulation into all the wall cavities in the kitchen. It made it really warm!!!

all finished and snug as a bug in a rug. they plugged up all the holes with orange spray-foam insulation. there were something like 30 holes around the kitchen.

office / kitchen / livingroom / dining room / construction site

mike at work.

kitchen insulation is all done now, we have someone coming to put up blueboard and plaster the walls within a week or two! at the moment we are spending every waking moment in this room, working and cooking and eating and living and trying to stay warm!

insulation in the kitchen

we worked like crazy this weekend to finish all electrical work in the kitchen, and put up insulation!!! Richard took the day off from work on Friday to help us, and came back on Saturday, and on Sunday, bless his heart for dedicating three entire days to helping us here. Richard finished up the electric stuff on Friday while we started measuring and cutting the insulation. The plan is to use 2″ thick sheets of rigid foam insulation, backed with a shiny foil vapor barrier on both sides. It comes in giant sheets, like 8′ x 3′ which are really unwieldy to handle and make a lot of squeaky noises whenever you move them around, but they are definitely more pleasant to handle than that horrible pink cotton-candy fiberglass batting stuff, ick. Anyway, all exterior walls get covered in these boards of rigid foam insulation, on top of the bare studs. This leaves an approx. 3.5″ cavity between the outside wall of the house and the rigid foam insulation. We’ve hired a company called Sustainable Structures , who my parents ran across at the Common Ground Fair, they will come in a cut holes in the foam board, and blow in a bunch of loose insulation fiber into the wall cavities. They use super-high-pressure blowers so it supposedly fills every last nook and cranny in there, it’s (hopefully) the most efficient way you can insulate these days. The fiber is made from recycled newspaper treated with some kind of stuff to make it moisture-proof, fire-proof and rodent-repellent. Let’s hope it’s as awesome as they say it is.

hanging Typar on the walls

2″ rigid foam sheets

So for the moment our goal is to finish hanging all the rigid foam insulation by Nov. 18th, that’s our date for them to come blow in the dense-pack cellulose insulation fiber. We spent Saturday and Sunday measuring the walls, cutting down the foam to fit each section of walls, marking out where the studs are located (so they know where to cut the holes to blow in the insulation next week) and cutting oddly-shaped holes to fit all the electrical switches and outlet boxes. Since none of our walls or floors or anything is at right angles (old house!) it’s a challenge to custom-cut every piece of insulation to fit every saggy, curvy, weirdly-angled corner of the kitchen. Then measure, cut & screw in strapping every 16″ up the wall, to anchor the insulation in place (and to give us something to hang the wallboard from, when that time comes). Then we need to use foil tape and this crazy orange canned spray foam to patch and fill every last crack and seam and opening. The wall cavity has to be airtight, in order to blow in the insulation. In some places we had to cover the exterior wall with sheets of Tyvek before hanging the insulation, to make it airtight. So at this point we’ve got the entryway / mud-room insulated, and two of the three exterior kitchen walls insulated. Still need to do one more wall, and a lot of spray-foaming. Hoping this week we can fit in a lot of work hours and get it done before next weekend?

Kit, Eliza and Mike at work on the insulation project

putting strapping over giant sheets of 2″ thick rigid foam insulation in the kitchen!

The kitchen feels really different now! Instead of rough, dusty, dark old stained, weathered wooden walls and studs, we now have BRIGHT SHINY foil walls with neat stripes of strapping all over. It certainly looks modern and clean and impressive. But the temperature outside is dropping and the winds are howling, I think it’s 27 degrees out now, and it’s plenty cold and drafty in here. The woodstove is cozy and warm! But you can’t really sit still anywhere more than 12 inches away from the woodstove. We’ve got lots more insulating and wind-proofing work to go!!!

update: 1 week later, we finished all the rigid foam! HOORAY!

putting up strapping over the very last piece of insulation!!!

more structural adjustments

structural adjustments

this is old news, from back in October. Just some photos of another structural adjustment in the kitchen, over the years with the settling of the house this joint had opened up and since we had everything torn open and stripped down to the studs, before we started rebuilding we tried to close up this as much as we could.

once we had tightened it up as best we could, Richard drove in a buncha bolts to keep it in place. They’ll show once the kitchen is finished, since the beam will be exposed.
need to post a photo of the finished beam here!