In a mad rush to get our 106 year old farm house ready for a couple of week's worth of family visits, Karen and I put the finishing touches on the kitchen island project. To summarize, this is a project we started almost a year ago, with the sawing of an old dead pine tree into lumber. We later added some home-sawed American black walnut to the mix - from a tree we removed from a pond dam. Sawing our own lumber made the project take longer, but it made our material cost insignificant and allowed us to source hardware from a blacksmith and stools from an artisan maker in Arizona (we gave each other a stool last year for Christmas).

Karen finished the kitchen island's base by first sanding and then staining the pine with a walnut stain. The final touch is a single coat of satin enamel that allows some of the stain to show - she was going for an antique look and did an excellent job with it.

The towel bars were wrought by a blacksmith friend from Volcano, California. The walnut top was glued up using 5 planks. I added breadboard ends and routed grooves for some slightly contrasting strips between the planks on the upper surface. The top was glued with epoxy to which I added some pecan wood flour as a thickener. The assembled top was then encapsulated with three coats of epoxy (no additives) with an additional 5 coats of satin polyurethane. So far the thick walnut pieces have remained dimensionally stable.

This shot shows some of the stain bleed-through on the island's base. The overhang is about 12 inches -- those stools have wonderfully wide seats.

We've been using the island for about a month now and it performs very nicely -- even the old fashioned wooden-slide drawers I made. We did soap the slides before inserting the drawers.

Just a quick update on my kitchen island project. Last weekend I built the drawer boxes and framed one of the doors before deciding it was just too cold and damp to linger out in the barn any longer. I thought about hooking up the portable propane forced air heater but opted to let the glue cure in the barn's small heated laundry room instead. If you remember, in the first part of this project, I milled some dead pine, re-sawed and planed it and then started constructing the island's frame. In the second installment, I completed most of the frame using hand tools and in the third installment, I framed the drawer slides and milled and planed additional lumber for the ends and back. My goal is to have this piece finished by Christmas -- I might not make it, but I will try.

Here's the kitchen island with all three drawer boxes inserted  into the slides. I will make faces to cover the visible ends of the drawers once I build and fit the cabinet doors. I'm going to leave the slides as they are -- with a little sanding and waxing -- and see how it goes before considering installation of some nylon or teflon glides.

I built the drawer boxes using pine that I sawed from a dead tree. I planed the front, back and sides down to 1/2-inch thick. The bottom is right at 1/4-inch thick and it sits in a groove around the bottom of the front and sides. The back sets down on the bottom and I pinned it with a couple of small finishing nails.

I apologize for the location of the focal point in this photo -- or the focus point, more truthfully. My phone's camera isn't too sophisticated. However you can see that I joined the corners of the drawer boxes using interlocking dados and rebates. I made the cuts with the table saw and cleaned them out with a 1/4-inch chisel. It took a little dinking to get everything to fit nice and snug but once it did, the boxes pretty much squared up on their own. All the joints are glued with Gorilla wood glue. Molly the Border Terrier is my faithful woodworking companion. Here she is taking a break from tracking down rodents to look over my handiwork. You can also see that I have days of sanding ahead of me, but I find that to be fairly relaxing work.

It feels like this project is finally coming together. The drawer boxes actually slide easily and land square with the front, even with a 10-pound weight in them. I would have continued on to the cabinet doors, but the weather chased me in on Saturday. And on Sunday, I stayed indoors to write a chapter for the book Karen Keb and I are writing together. It's called Plowing With Pigs and is about all kinds of 21^st-Century homestead solutions, including making stuff with materials you can get for free. Stay tuned for more information on the book and on this project.

I finally managed to get back to the kitchen island project last weekend (see part 1 and part 2). This time, I focussed on framing in the drawer slides and enclosing the sides and installing the bottom shelf. As fate, or luck would have it, I ran out of suitable lumber for the sides so I took the opportunity to put a Hud-Son Homesteader HFE-21 sawmill to work. I cut another 9-foot long length off the long-dead pine that I felled last spring. That tree will have yielded all of the lumber needed for the island except the top and then some. Even though sheet goods might make more sense for the drawer bottoms and the cabinet doors, I am committed to building the entire kitchen island from lumber grown and milled right here on the farm. I know that's no great feat for folks living in New England, but here on the Kansas plains, dead trees of any kind tend to get bucked for firewood, dozed into holes and buried, or dozed into piles and burned.

The kitchen island is finally taking shape. The pine planks and timbers will be painted or stained once we decide what the top will look like. We're leaning toward solid American black walnut at the moment, but that is subject to change.

This is only the third time in my life that I've built and installed drawers in cabinets. This time I am making old-fashioned wooden slides that I plan to lubricate with soap or hard tallow -- the slide framing is installed here. I broke down and used some carefully placed screws to help with the installation. As always, bore pilot holes for best results.

The Hud-Son bandsaw mill came in mighty handy for cutting additional planks from the well-seasoned pine log. One advantage to this mill over the Alaskan chainsaw mill is that it wastes much less wood. It's also faster, quieter and the little 6-horsepower Briggs engine didn't put me to sleep with both big barn doors open and the Kansas gale-force breeze blowing through. When not in use, it's easy to tuck the entire mill out of the way.

Planking the bottom was straightforward. I chose 0.75-inch rough boards, milled them smooth and nailed them to the frameworks. Rather than butting planks against one another, I cut half laps along their edges so they would overlap by about 0.75 inch. These ship-lap style joints will allow some expansion and contraction but prevent opening to daylight. For the sides (and back) I nailed 3/8-inch thick planks spaced about 3 inches apart. The joint cover-boards are about 4.5-inches wide with laps milled into both edges sufficient to overlap the planks by about 0.75 inch. I don't know what it's called, or even if you are "allowed" to use such crude joinery anymore, but that's how the back and sides were planked on a cool antique cabinet I saw at a flea market -- so I went with it.

Here you can sort of make out how the lapped board fills the space between the two wider planks.

This is the main reason that I believe the kitchen island's top will be made of American black walnut (pardon my shadow). It felt good to get the bulk of the largest downed walnut converted into some nice lumber. I'm still  not certain that the kitchen island's top will be solid walnut, or exactly how I will join the heavy planks. Stay tuned to find out.

For me, building a kitchen island with wood grown and milled into lumber on my farm is a labor of love. It's also slower than if I bought all the materials and didn't take the time to appreciate the process itself. In the first installment, I reported on using my drill press to rough out the mortises for the front and back frames. I decided to switch to hand tools for cutting the mortises for the framing members that connect the front and back and that will support the drawers. I still used the table saw to form the tenons. I was surprised at how easy it was to square and plumb the assembled frame. My thoughts are now aimed at completing the drawer slide framing, building drawers and then milling more lumber for the sides, back and cabinet doors.

I used a level concrete floor to plum and square the kitchen island's mortised and glued frame. In this shot I have not yet removed excess glue -- yes, I used Gorilla glue just like last time and it expands a bit as it cures and pushes out of the seams.

Chopping mortises is much easier if you remove as much material as you can with a boring tool of some sort. The ships auger chucked into an old fashioned brace makes for easy boring. Take care to keep the bit plumb and you'll have an easy time cleaning the excess material out with a pair of heavy-duty mortising chisels and mallet.

Since I only have a few bar clamps long enough to span more than 24 inches, I just use binder straps where practical. With two bar clamps and two straps, a little tapping, wracking, and setting a 100-pound plank on top of the frame it was amazingly easy to get it all plumb and squared up. It'll be a few weekends before I get back to this project, but at this point I'm very motivated to finish it. Stay tuned.

Last weekend I finally got around to building a kitchen island using some of the lumber I milled early last spring. Building with homemade lumber takes a little more time, but the payoff is huge in satisfaction, price and the fact that you get to control the dimensions of the boards. Next time you are in the mood to build a kitchen island, I encourage you to begin by heading out to the woodlot and try your hand at working with homemade lumber

You might recall our kitchen project from early this year. There are a couple of finishing touches that need to be completed to call the project done. One is the kitchen island and the other is building a new light fixture. After a long hot summer of more pressing farm chores, when I awoke last Saturday, I knew the time was right for setting to on the kitchen island.

The project began with the felling and milling of a long-dead pine in our slowly dying pine grove. I used to mourn the passing of each tree, now I look at it with an eye for opportunity.

Once I had the timbers in hand, I needed to resaw them into dimensions that made sense for an old-school, farmhouse-style kitchen island. This I accomplished with my table saw.

Once I had all of the framing pieces and legs cut from the timbers, I sized them using a small thickness planer that I picked up for very little money at a yard sale. The nice thing about a thickness planer is that you can get all four edges smooth and you can make boards with precisely uniform cross sectional dimensions. Hand planes work well for this also, but the thickness planer took hours off the truing and smoothing time.

I used the table saw to cut tenons for the rails. In this case, I used through tenons let into 3.25-inch thick legs. I cut the mortises using a 3/4-inch bit chucked in the drill press and cleaned them out with an old set of Marples mortising chisels I found at a flea market back in my boat-building days.

After a bit of machining, I wound up with a stack of home-harvested structural parts for the kitchen island. Legs on the left and rails on the right - note how uniform the tenons are. Yes, with care and by exercising extreme and focussed caution you can use your table saw to cut long tenons this way. Do not try it if you are not fairly experienced and comfortable with  the table saw - practice on shorter tenons until you understand the saw.

A little Gorilla Glue, tapping, clamping, squaring and voila, you have one side of the kitchen island framed out. This operation took me a couple of hours one afternoon. Hours well spent listening to favorite old tunes creating something that's going to make my Partner In Culinary Crime smile. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.

The new mudroom addition needed a bench to facilitate the putting on and taking off of boots so I decided that building a rustic bench with hand-worked walnut would fit the bill. Actually the idea to build a rustic bench was partly mine and partly my Partner In Culinary Crime’s (PICC). Not quite a year ago, we happened upon a sawyer in Missouri who specialized in supplying the premium gunstock industry with American Black Walnut blanks. And it just so happened that he had several huge slabs of walnut on his trailer that were inferior for the gunstock trade, but my PICC and I saw big potential in the pieces – so we struck a bargain and hoisted three of the 200-pound slabs into our pickup truck, which is where they sat for about 3 months before we unloaded them in the barn.

Fast forward about 7 more months and last Saturday I found myself  voluntarily evicted from the house because it was my PICC’s book club day, which explained all the bread baking and cooking that ensued before I headed out to chore the animals that morning. I am actually allowed in the house on book club day, but I don’t really feel comfortable there – it’s not the books that make me nervous, it’s being the only guy near what is so clearly not a guy event that makes me nervous.

So, after feeding the animals and moving the cattle and corralling the donkeys, I was wandering around the barn dreaming of a hot cup of coffee when I spied the heavy walnut slabs all akimbo right where I slid them off the truck. And as I turned to see what kind of bird was fluttering up in the rafters (a dove of some sort) I noticed a nice straight walnut log that was about 10 inches in diameter and 20 inches long. It hit me like a Eureka moment! I would saw down one of the slabs and rive out four legs for it from the walnut log and make a serviceable, if not beautiful mudroom bench. I looked forward to the physical nature of the work, because it was about 16 degrees in the barn.

The walnut slab was sawed out from a large crotch using what must be a giant band saw mill – it was pretty uniformly 2.5 inches thick and contained both sapwood and heartwood figuring. Luckily one edge was more or less straight and so I cut the 30-inch wide piece down to about 16-inches wide and trimmed it to about 4-feet in length. I did some definitely-not-UL-approved things with my table saw to make that happen – not recommended. The sweat I worked up cutting the walnut stemmed from the physical nature of horsing 200 pounds of lumber around and the adrenaline rush of keeping one’s digits intact doing it.

I next employed our very nice and very heavy-duty Porter Cable belt sander (I learned to control and love belt sanders in my boat-building days) to knock down the band saw marks created by the sawmill and to round some of the corners that weren’t naturally rounded as part of the tree. One cool thing about that sander is that it has a dust-collection bag. I am not fond of the taste of walnut dust. Blech! 

Finally, I turned my attention to the short walnut log – it was not green but it was not more than 9 months dry. I had to work a bit to make the first split with the froe and maul, but the subsequent splits were like butter and in short order I had split out 4 lovely leg blanks that tapered from about 3 inches square to 2 inches square. After about an hour with the drawknife, spoke shave and sheath knife, I had four nice rustic legs with a mostly round cross section. I trimmed one end of each to an eleven-degree angle on the table saw, located mounting holes on the bottom of the walnut slab and used a ships augur to bore holes that angled about 11 degrees toward the corners. Oh, I forgot to mention that I found four half-inch by six-inch long lag bolts on my workbench and decided not to mortise the legs into the bench – not recommended, I know, but…

About this time, book club had broken up and my PICC helped install the legs – she held them fast while I applied considerable torque on the lag bolts. I used a mortising chisel to cut reliefs in the top of the bench to countersink the bolt heads – that way the wood-dope filler would look kind of like a tenon. I know this makes the fine woodworkers among you wince, but some days you feel like cutting 11-degree through mortises and some days you don’t. In this case, I wanted the project to be finished by Sunday noon.

Sunday involved sanding, a bit of whittling and a good soaking with very hot linseed oil. I won’t tell you how I got the linseed oil hot because it’s not an approved method (traditional boat builders among you will know what I did). I will tell you that I used an old cotton tube sock to work the oil in and an old cotton t-shirt to wipe the excess off. I’m kind of tickled with how the bench turned out. We’ll see if it serves its purpose starting tomorrow.

Since I finished the bench so early in the day, I started on a key cabinet that doubles as an enclosure for a couple of old faucets that intrude on the mudroom space, but that’s a story for another day. Stay tuned.

After three partial weekends of work, I finally finished building a pantry cabinet in the mudroom project that began about 15 months ago. Building a pantry cabinet is probably like chopping liver for lots of woodworkers out there, but it was a first for me -- and I know I broke a few cardinal rules of fine woodworking while building our pantry cabinet, but in this case homemade is just right. To update you on the mudroom project, the addition is completely finished inside and outside with the exception of re-fitting the siding on the original house where the mudroom's gabled roof attaches. The floors are done, the hot water heater is nestled in its final spot in the corner between the washer and dryer. The coat/coverall hooks are in place and now the 6-ft by 5-ft pantry cabinet is all but finished. My Partner In Culinary Crime is putting the final finishing touches on the pantry cabinet today and she says she can't wait to fill it with the goods -- and then get started on the KITCHEN RENNOVATION -- Yikes!

Building the pantry cabinet was easier than I figured it would be because my Partner In Culinary Crime (PICC) is a talented artist and handed me a 3-dimensional drawing, complete with pictures and arrows and measurements and suggested materials. A not so quick trip to the local home-improvement store caused us to change some of the materials. Have you seen the price of oak these days?!??! So knotty pine it is. Have you seen the price of knotty pine these days?!??!  Criminy, back when I was building wooden boats lumber wasn't so expensive, but that was 20 years ago. Basically I chose some #2 1 by 3 material for the frame and door faces, #3 material for the shelves and top and a lovely #1 clear board for the “backsplash” as my PICC calls it.

Since I don’t have a biscuit cutter or a doweling jig, I made the unilateral decision to use 1.75-inch and 1.25-inch drywall screws and some glue to hold things together. Please don’t hate me for that, I like screws and they work great if you drill pilot holes and use a bit that makes it possible to countersink the head. A little wood dope and the holes are barely visible – this is a farm house after all. I did splurge for some 3/16-inch thick pine tongue-and-groove bead board for the panels. I used a power miter saw to cut pieces to length and a table saw to rip and cut rebates. My trusty, 20 something year old Milwaukee corded hole shooter doubled as a boring tool and a driver. The Jacobs chuck got a heck of a workout with all the bit changes. I love that tool.

Since my PICC wanted the top panels of the door to "breathe" we stapled black aluminum screening to the frames. We had "discussion" over the see-through nature of the screen and the expense to value of the perforated aluminum we'd seen at the local home improvement store. She asked me to reconsider the aluminum and I said "heck no" as I headed to the truck to drive 20 miles back to town to pick the aluminum panels up. Wow, do those door panels look awesome. And the smile they bring to our faces is well worth the expense.

Since my PICC is a total detail person, she agreed to handle the sanding -- I tried to micromanage now and then but only to get a little attention by way of rolling eyes. I have to admit, this definitely wasn't her first day.

Thankfully my PICC is a total detail person and wouldn't let me near the stain. I didn't bother trying to micromanage since I was otherwise occupied with a science experiment in the adjacent laundry room.

I'm really thrilled with how the cabinet turned out. I'll install the pull knobs this week and then start contemplating the kitchen. Stay tuned.