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. A couple of finishing touches 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 focused 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 create something that will make my partner in culinary crime smile. Stay tuned for the next installment.
Hank Will raises hair sheep, heritage cattle and many varieties of open-pollinated corn with his wife, Karen Keb, on their rural Osage County, Kansas farm. His home life is a perfect complement to his professional life as editor in chief at GRIT and Capper’s Farmer magazines.
