M.T. Acres

Building a kitchen is an exercise in patience and planning.  Each cabinet has to be built individually and fitted to the cabinet or wall or appliance next to it.  But until all of the cabinets are done and all of the appliances arrive, you never really know what the finished product is going to look like.  This was the week all of that came together.

I started by building the last cabinet for the kitchen.  Unfortunately, I saved the toughest one for last – the cabinet to hold Tina’s double ovens.  I am glad I waited to start this one until we had the actual ovens here because the cabinet dimensions are actually quite a bit more flexible than the online documentation for it would lead you to believe.

Even so, just the size of this beast made it a challenge to build.  It is 32 inches wide, 26 inches deep and 94 inches tall.  The ovens weigh just shy of 400 pounds, so the cabinet also needs to be really strong as well.

Obviously, the dimensions of the sides and back are far too big for 2 people to manage cutting accurately on a tablesaw.  So I machined the whole thing by hand.

To start with, I needed to cut the side and back to width.  Unfortunately, the longest straight edge I have is 52 inches.  So I went to the local hardware store to buy an 8 foot piece of angle iron.  But the longest angle iron they had was 6 foot.  While talking with the proprietor and explaining what I was trying to do, he came up with a suggestion…  He loaned me (without charge) the store straight edge that went to a full 9 feet!

Score!

With this baby I was easily able to make the 3 accurate cuts with my circular saw that I needed to make on the sides and back.  (Note: I made sure to clean it up really well before I brought it back as well as lubricate it with a dry lubricant, which it desperately needed.)

Next up was cutting the dados for the top and 2 bottoms.

For that I just used a straight-cut router bit with a brass template guide in the router.  Then I was able to just clamp a couple of scrap pieces of plywood where I wanted the dado and route away.  I did a similar setup for the rabbit on the back.

I should have done the same thing when routing the dado for the top of the cabinet.  But I figured I could just use the edge guide for my router since the top dado was only 1 1/2 inches from the top.  I was about halfway through the first cut when the edge guide gave way and my dado curved down.  That is why the cabinet is 94 inches instead of 96 inches.

The glue-up was also not a whole lot of fun just due to the size.  So I took it in steps glueing a few pieces and letting them dry for a full hour before moving onto the next phase.

Because of the weight of the ovens, I decided to glue extra 3/4 inch pieces of plywood under the bottom that will hold the ovens.

The face frame was easy enough to build, but due to its size, it had to be glued up on the floor.

Finally, we were able to get the face frame glued on as well as the crown moulding.

In short, this was the biggest case piece I have ever built and I am no hurry to do it again.  But it turned out pretty good.

Tina cleaned up the saw marks that I missed in my initial sanding and got the first coat of varnish on it today.  Per usual, she is making my mediocre workmanship look outstanding.

The other major (and minor) accomplishments the week…

Tina got the center island for the kitchen finished.  It came out great.

Then, we got the top cabinets all hung and permanently mounted as well as got the base cabinets all set and sized with the appliances to make sure everything fits.  So far, everything is fitting perfectly!

(The color difference between the base cabinets and the top cabinets is due to my taking the photo late in the day.  The sunset is reflecting off the top cabinets and the bottoms are just ambient light.)

A major concern of mine was whether the cooktop would fit the cabinet I built for it.  I built the cabinet before we had the cooktop so I just used the specs from the website.  That was fine, but there were a couple of measurements that I had not noticed until after I had built the cabinet.  So we test fit it as best we could using a couple scraps of 3/4 inch plywood to simulate the countertop.

It will fit with plenty of room to spare.

Lastly, we got the pain-in-the-neck pocket door hung in the master closet.

This was the week that all of the work we have been doing for the last month finally came together and we could actually see what it is going to look like when we are done.  It seems fitting this should happen the weekend before Thanksgiving since that is the holiday we celebrate the hard work we have done in the past year and God’s gifts to us through those tribulations.

A happy and blessed Thanksgiving to all of you!

We only had about a day and a half working at M.T. Acres this week and Tina was definitely the star of the show this week!

First, her appliances were finally delivered Friday.  (That is only 3 weeks later than they said they would be delivered. – Which was 2 weeks later than I asked them to be delivered.)  The delay did not really slow us down much, I just wanted to have the actual appliances when I was building the base cabinets to verify they would fit.

The cooktop and range hood are in the 2 boxes.  I was too afraid to test fit the cooktop into its cabinet as that is the one I most concerned about.  But I will have to do that next week.

Tina decided to take on laying the floor “tile” in the shower of the master bathroom.

Rather than using traditional tile, we went with river rock.  They took actual river rocks and sliced them about 3/8″ thick.  Since the rocks are too small to be easily cut with a tile saw, they have to be laid out by hand fitting smaller rocks into the gaps.  It is a very tedious process.

Once she got them all laid out, she carefully took them out and put them on black plastic in the exact way she laid them out.

Then she put down a really heavy layer of thinset and set them back in.

Because they are natural stone, they had to be sealed before grouting.  So she put 2 coats of the sealer on today.  The sealer makes them look wet all the time.  They came out looking incredibly nice!

Because she had to put down such a thick layer of thinset, some of the thinset squeezed up between the rocks.  So we might have to chip some of that out before she grouts it.  But that is not too big of a deal and it really looks sharp.

For my part, I did a lot of busy work this weekend.

I started by finishing up the carcass for the kitchen island.

While the glue was drying on the carcass, I made the corner mouldings for it.

Then I made the face frame and got it and the mouldings glued onto the cabinet.

While that was drying, I decided to hang a couple more finished cabinets in the kitchen and see if the refrigerator fit.

It fit perfect with about 1/2 inch to spare!

By then the kitchen island was dry so we brought it in and test fit it with the electric wires.

Perfect fit!

We also finally got the hardware from the builder to be able to hang the pocket door on the master bedroom closet after asking for them for about 3 months.

I bought the door from Homely Despot about 3 months ago and never even opened the box to look at it.  I wish I had because I would have taken it back.  The veneer is about as thick as a sheet of paper and the core of the door is made of genuine cardboard!

The veneer is so thin that even cutting it with a razor sharp bench chisel, it still peels up.

Hopefully, Tina can clean that up a little bit when she varnishes it, but if not, oh well.  The door is going to be open 99% of the time anyway so it will not show.

The little bit of actual wood that was part of the door was also all split.  So we spent close to an hour putting glue in the splits with a toothpick and clamping it together.

All in all, I am pretty unhappy with Homely Despot and will not buying anything more from them if I can possibly avoid it.

Lastly, for ages men have wondered: “How did cats learn to make that ‘meow’ noise”?

Answer: By running them through a bandsaw!

My goal for this weekend was to get the carcass for the center island in the kitchen built.  I mostly accomplished my goal, but I also made a lot of really dumb mistakes along the way too.

Tina set out to get the final 3 coats of varnish on the top cabinets and they came out GREAT!

The way she does the finishing is to first sand the bare wood with 220 grit sandpaper.  After wiping off the dust with a tack rag, she puts on 2 thin coats of varnish.  Then sands them with 400 grit sandpaper and puts on the last 2 coats.

Saturday afternoon, she came out to my shop and told me she was having some trouble with the palm sander.  It was stopping intermittently but would then start up again.  A few minutes later she came out and told me it started shooting sparks at her.

At least this one died like a palm sander should.

When we were building the kitchen cabinets for our Minnesota house, she killed a palm sander exactly like the one pictured above by sanding through the cord.  To this day, I have no idea how she did it because she caught it right next to where the cord goes into the housing.

Since we have an anniversary coming up this month, I wonder how she would feel about a new palm sander for an anniversary present?

One night last week we went into Tucson and picked up some more wood for the kitchen cabinets and got the wood for the bathroom cabinets.  So my first task was to rearrange my wood pile.

So I put the black walnut for the guest bathroom on the bottom.

Then came the quarter sawn white oak for the master bathroom.

The original plan was to do the master bathroom with hickory.  But the hickory they had looked like crap.  It looked like it had gotten really wet, then dried.  It was all stained and not single board ran straight for more than 12 inches.  So we settled on white oak, but I think it will look good.

Then I got a few more pieces of rift-sawn red oak because as the design of the kitchen has evolved the last few weeks, we added quite a few more drawers than I originally anticipated.

Finally, I added the red oak I had and the poppel for the drawer bodies.  I might need to get a little more poppel, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it because I do not want to have much poppel left over because I do not use it making furniture.

Lastly, I had to get the plywood for the master bathroom cabinets and a couple more sheets to finish out the kitchen.

Then it was onto constructing the center kitchen island.

When most guys build a center island, they build a false bottom.  Then they screw the false bottom to the floor and set the cabinet over the false bottom and screw the two together.  But I am not “most guys”.

This center island needs to be rigid and strong.  Not just strong, but as my good friend Harold says, “It has to pass the elephant test”.  I.E. It needs to be strong enough to hold an elephant sitting on it.  So I decided to build the entire thing from 3/4″ plywood rather than just the sides with no false bottom and all as one piece, strengthened with oak where needed.

Tina wants the lower part of the cabinet to have 2 doors and pull-out shelves.  She plans on filling it with plates and china etc.  That is, really heavy stuff.  So I decided to go with 200 pound drawer glides for the shelves.

Since the cabinet is a full 48 inches wide, I decided that an extra piece of 3/4″ plywood down the middle will help keep the shelves from warping and also, effectively double the weight the cabinet will hold.

The problem is, the electrical for the switch and outlet going in the right side of the cabinet comes through the floor right in the center of the cabinet near the front.  So I had to work that out.

The first step was to cut the sides and the center piece, then plow the dados for glueing the oak to hold the drawer glides.

That is where I introduced my first “operator error”.  Because the dados on both side of the center piece are each 1/4″ deep, it means there is only 1/4″ of plywood left in the middle.  Therefore, when I glued the drawer glide mounts, I had to be really careful to keep even pressure on the clamps or the plywood would warp.

I, apparently, was not careful enough because when we went to assemble it, the center piece of plywood was bent like a noodle.  We were able to make it work because it fits into a dado in the back of the cabinet and will be glued to the face frame in front.  But what a chore that was!

I also made a bad cut on the back of the cabinet.  I had to cut a 3/4″ wide by 1/4″ deep dado on the top and bottom of the back to hold the top and bottom of the cabinet.  Because the back is 47″ wide, I knew I should have cut them by had with a router, but I used my table saw instead.  When cutting the bottom dado, I was about 2/3 of the way through the cut and I got the back jammed up on the table saw fence.  So I tore out about 1/8″ of veneer on the inside bottom.

It will never show because it is in the inside back of the cabinet and the bottom shelf will hide the mistake.  But I know it is there.

The next step was glue up.  Glue up is where everything comes together or it doesn’t.  Since this cabinet had been fighting me every step of the way, I was sure something was going to go horribly wrong during glue up and I would have to start over.

We did it in phases and it went surprisingly smooth.

The first step was to glue the center piece in and get it perfectly square.

I thought that I should also glue the other top piece in at the same time, but when I checked it with my square everything was perfect.  Not wanting to tempt fate with this one, I decided to let these two pieces set up before proceeding.

Next up was to get the side and bottom of the left half done.

Normally, I take the clamps off after 20-30 minutes, but I left these on for a full hour because I wanted it good and dry.

Once that was done, glueing up the right side was easy.

The notch you see in the bottom is where the electrical will come through.

The last part to finishing the carcass was to make a piece of oak that goes across the top of the toe kick and fashion a couple of pine boards that I can mount the toe kick trim to.

I measured carefully.  I cut carefully.  I even carefully cut a dado to give some added strength to the center plywood.  I test fit it and everything fit perfectly.  Then I promptly glued the pine to the wrong side of the oak.

It was at that point that I decided to end the day, even if it was a little early and I was not completely done with everything I had set out to do.  Making rookie mistakes like this are a sure sign that I am about to ruin more material or cut off a finger.

So we packed it in and went back to the rental house.  I took a much needed shower and then a nap.

Due to my work commitments, we only had a couple days to work on M.T. Acres this week.

Tina sanded and got the first coat of varnish on the top corner cabinet.  Then I had to stop her progress on finishing it because I needed it to size some of the other top cabinets.

I got the face frame and crown moulding glues on the cooktop cabinet.

The crown moulding is a pain in the neck to clamp while glueing because most of the clamping surface is outside the plane of the face frame.  Thus, it has a tendency to want to roll as soon as you put any pressure on the clamps.  We found using the longer pipe clamps along with a couple cargo straps works about the best.

Once that dried, I was able to add the inlay.

The corner cabinet, the cooktop cabinet and the refrigerator cabinet all hang on a wall with 2 inside corners.  Those are always a pain in the neck because you have to get the face frames exactly the right size or there will be a very noticeable gap.

My solution was to temporarily hang the corner cabinet and the cooktop cabinet on the wall, then build the face frame for the refrigerator cabinet a bit oversized and trim it fit exactly.

So the first step was to make some wall hangers from scrap 1/2 inch plywood.

Then measure and screw them to the wall studs with the 45° angle pointed towards the wall.

The screws that I am using on the hangers are pretty good sized – #10 X 3 1/2 inches.  With the first couple, I was having some trouble tearing up the Phillips bits in my drill.  I wrecked 2 bits and 4 screws.  Then I remembered I should be lubricating my screws:

So for any of you young bucks, if you plan to do any screwing make sure you have plenty of screw lube.  It makes for a much better screwing experience.  (A wax ring for a toilet or Ivory bar soap work equally well.)

I like hanginging wall cabinets this way because it allows me to put all of the cabinets on the wall before I permanently affix them.  It also allows me to get the cabinets aligned with each other and screwed together while they still have a little bit of movement.  Then, once everything is all perfectly aligned and fitted together, I can screw the whole assembly to the wall.

Once these two were in place, I took my measurements and built the face frame for the refrigerator cabinet.  I made the stile on the right side about 3/4 inch wider than the rest of the stiles.

Then with some careful planing, scraping and sanding, we were able to get a perfect fit even though the wall is not perfectly flat.  I was also very happy that it only took about 5 tries to get it to fit.

Once we got the fit right, we took it back down and added the crown moulding and the inlay.

Once the crown moulding was on, I could not resist the urge to see what the wall would look like once they are all hung.

Tina still has 3 more coats of varnish and one sanding to do on the corner cabinet as well as all four coats and 2 sandings to do on the others.  But at least we can envision what the whole project is going to look like when it is done.

My original plan was to make all of the top cabinets the same depth and the same height.  I am really glad we decided to make some of them taller and deeper than the others.  It really makes the whole wall more interesting and really accents the crown mouldings.

The other 2 wall cabinets are done through all 4 coats of varnish but I did not hang them because we have to take these down again for Tina to finish the others.

The wires sticking out from the wall are for the LED lights that go under the cabinets.  I was more than a little concerned about those as well.  The wire needs to come out below the bottom of the cabinet but still through a hole in the back of the cabinet.  That only leaves me with about a 1/2 inch of “wiggle room” for the hole.  But after measuring the wires and the backs of the cabinets, everything looks like it is going to fit together perfectly.

Next week, it is on to building the kitchen island while Tina finishes the top cabinets.

This week started off not working on the house at all.  We helped our friend Eve with the Fall roundup of her cattle.  Having never been involved with a roundup before, I had no idea what to expect.

I knew working cattle was physically demanding and I figured we would be in a lot of pain at the end of the day from spending so much time riding a horse.  Surprisingly, I came through it in pretty good shape.  When I climbed down from the horse after riding steadily for 4-5 hours, it only took walking about 30 steps to get my knee and hip joints reconfigured back to being a biped again and I really did not experience any muscle pain at all.

I attribute it to laying all of the floor tile at M.T. Acres.  The tiling took such a toll on me physically, I think I may now be numb to anything that does not rise to that pain level.

Tina got beat up a little bit in the roundup.  But even she was moving better than I had expected.  The only thing we did notice is spending so much time in the sunshine made us both absolutely exhausted.  I slept deeper than I ever remember doing in the past.

We must have done okay at the roundup because Eve and her crew already invited us back to help with the Spring roundup.  WOO HOO!!!

We did not get any pictures of the roundup worth posting because we were both too busy rounding up to take pictures.  We were done by about noon on Friday, so it was back to work on kitchen cabinets.

I started off by glueing the face frame on the top corner cabinet.

My cradle jig worked perfectly!  It allowed me to use 2 cargo straps to hold the middle of the face frame and made it really easy to clamp the top and bottom with Bessy clamps.

Although it does not show well in the picture, I always make the stiles (the vertical pieces of the face frame) a little bit wider than the cabinet.  With a standard box cabinet, I then just use a flush trim router bit to trim the stiles to the exact width of the cabinet side.

That was not an option with the corner cabinet because the face frame is 45 degrees to the side rather than 90 degrees.  Since all of my good hand planes are still packed in boxes at the rental house from the move, I had to use a cabinet scraper.

For any of you unfamiliar with a cabinet scraper, it is just a piece of sheet metal.  The one I used for this cabinet is about 2 x 5 inch rectangle made from 24 guage spring steel.  To use it, you just file an edge until there is a burr on the edge.  Then you just hold it with both hands and bend it so there is a slight bow in the scraper and scrape the burr across the workpiece.

It is a slow process and the scraper heats up because you are basically cutting with the friction caused between the wood and the burr on the scraper.  I could only scrape for about 3-4 minutes continuously because the scraper heats up enough to start burning the wood (and my fingers).  Then, I let it cool off for a minute or two and repeat the process.  So it took a good 2 hours to get the face frame scraped how I wanted it.

Then I got the crown mouldings cut, sized and glued.  And finally, I glued the inlay.

Then I started the face frame for this nasty bugger.  You may remember a couple weeks ago when I built the carcass for this monster, it was originally intended to be three simple, separate cabinets that turned into one because of space constraints and where the studs in the wall behind it lined up.  Since then, this one has turned into a nightmare.

When building face frames for box cabinets, I usually just get the dimensions right and glue them up.  Then I can flip the face frame over side to side or even top to bottom to get the best fit and the best look.  With this one, I cannot do that because the skinny part on the left is 1 inch smaller than the skinny part of the right.  So I had to be careful to make sure I got the best side of each board facing out when I cut it.  Furthermore, the 2 stiles in the middle needed to be notched to fit the range hood.  In short, what looks to be pretty simple, turned into a serious pain in the neck!

It had to be glued up in 3 phases.  First the two center stiles and the bottom center rail (the horizontal piece).

Then the top rail.

Then the 2 bottom rails and outer stiles.

Then I dry fit it to the carcass and it looks pretty good.

That was when I noticed a glaring mistake.

On the right-side cabinet, I oriented the grain the wrong way!  The top and bottom of that cabinet are perfect square pieces and I remember thinking when I cut them that I have to be careful during glue up to get them positioned right.  Apparently I was not careful enough.

But at least I was consistent; I did the same thing on the top!

So, I figure I have 3 options:

1 – Rebuild the carcass.

2 – Ignore it and hope nobody notices.

3 – Tell the story about how Navajo women intentionally wove imperfections into their blankets and appropriate that logic into Tina’s kitchen cabinets.

I am choosing option #3.  Now that I have admitted to God, the world and everybody here on the intertubes about how damn stupid I was, I can now lie with impunity about it and keep a clear conscience.  So, I meant to do that!  🙂

Tina did the sanding on some of the top cabinets with 400 grit sandpaper and got coats 2 and 3 of the varnish laid down and it it shines like steel!

From a better light view, she is making the cabinets look great!

Finally, we have developed a routine when we are working at M.T. Acres.  The dogs get breakfast and morning pills at 7AM.  Then Tina throws out about 6-8 balls for Belle The Amazing Water Dog to fetch.  Did I mention Belle is a fetchin’ fool?  The vet calls her “ball motivated” but that is WAY understated.

The general program is that we throw balls for Belle for about 20 minutes.  After that, Tina picks up the ball most recently brought back and puts it in the evil ball storage box.  After that, Belle goes out and ranges until she finds another ball to bring back to us.  We throw that ball 3-4 more times until Tina put it into the evil spiteful storage box.  This continues until Tina puts all of the balls into the evil, hateful, spiteful storage box.

After Tina had put away the last of the balls, Belle went out ranging to see if she could find any others and she came back with this:

If you cannot see it well in the picture, it is a wild gourd.  We have them growing all over the place at M.T. Acres.  It is about the same size as her balls and it is yellow.  So I am sure her little pea-brain thought: “It looks like a ball so maybe they will throw it for me.”

In the interest of keeping Tina with some work that she can do, I decided to periodically take a few hours away from the cabinetry and woodworking stuff that I really enjoy to do some jack-pine savage carpentry, which it still fun and rewarding, but not as much as the cabinetry.  So this week, I decided I would take a couple hours and get the service door into the garage to the point where Tina could paint it.  That involved getting the brick moulding up and getting a door closer installed.

However, there was a problem.  When the builder installed the door, he did not install it plumb.  On the garage side, the door frame stuck out almost 1/2 inch on the bottom and was almost flush on the top.  Inside the house, we have the same problem but reversed.

So my solution was to clean up some of the crap with a utility knife, then to rip a 1/4 inch piece of pine to glue on one side of the brick moulding.  I did angle the rip cut a little but did not try and get an exact fit because the tapers did a heavy skim coat of mud when they were taping the sheetrock so the gap was not a consistent straight line.

The result came out pretty good but there is still a bit of a gap at the bottom of the door.  But I think Tina will easily be able to fill that in with painter’s caulk and make it look pretty good.

Then I hung the door closer and installed a door stop.  The door closer was a bit of a disappointment because of the 3 ways it could be installed, none of them were optimal.  The way I chose to install it is mechanically the best, but it does look a little weird because the closer is hanging down over the fake raised panel in the door.  Even so, it is plenty strong so I hope the inspector does not have a problem with it.

When we started this whole project, I told Tina that I would do the inside of the house however she wanted if she would leave my garage for me to decide how I did it.  Mostly I have been pretty good about honoring that agreement.  Then we came to the kitchen cabinets…

Tina has to be able to work in the kitchen every day, so it must be practical.  But it is also about the only place in the house where I can show off my woodworking skills.  My initial thought was she wanted real fancy tombstone shaped raised panel doors and something similar for the drawer profiles.  What she ended up deciding on is doors and drawers being square and having very simple rounded edges.  The doors on the top cabinets are going to have some kind of glass panels and the bottom doors are going to be simple flat panel oak.  I think it will actually look really nice, but it does not give me much to brag about.

So, the compromise was that I could do a crown moulding however I wanted (since it will not collect dust) but the doors and drawers will be simple roundovers.  Deal made!

After cutting up some samples and looking at the options with the bits I have and the bits I could order, we decided on a double stack Roman Ogee profile, and I got her to agree to a simple inlay for good measure.  I think we invented a whole new architectural style and I am calling it Southwestern Baroque.

Initially, I planned on just mounting the mouldings with a 3/8 inch by 1/4 inch rabbit.  That worked okay, but I was not happy with it because it did have some flex.  So I decided to beef it up a bit with some scrap that I collected when straightening the oak boards.  Much better!

Once I got the inlay laid down, it became a special kind of cool!  (More on that in a few minutes.)

My next step was to start on the face frame for the top corner cabinet.  The face frame was easy enough to make after cutting some clamping cauls from a scrap piece of 2X4.

But how to glue it on the cabinet while sitting at a 45 degree angle?

I farted around thinking on that one for at least an hour until I looked in my scrap wood pile and came up with these.  They took me about 15 minutes to build but about 1 hour to think of!

Once the glue mostly dried, I had to try them to see if they are everything I thought they would be.  They are!

I have not yet glued the face frame on because I wanted to give my jig a full night to dry before I put too much stress on it.  But they are rock solid!

Onto the part where all of the hard work comes together…

Tina did the final sanding and got the first coat of varnish on the top cabinets that I finished yesterday.  Holy crap!  Even with just one coat of varnish, they look amazing!

Due to my work schedule, we did not have a whole lot of time to work on the build this week.  But we were able to get the cabinet carcasses that I cut last week glued up.  I still have to cut the carcasses for Tina’s built-in ovens and build a center island cabinet for the kitchen.  Those two are going to be kind of a bugger to cut due to their size.  I am going to have to do all of the dados in them  by hand with a router because they are too big to manage on my tablesaw.  But otherwise the case work is done.

The really fun part of building cabinets is doing the face frames, doors and drawers.  This week, I started on the face frames.

The first order of business was planing down the face frame stock to fit the door hinges.  We could only get those stupid European hinges for the doors because they do not make the traditional half-lap hinges anymore in any styles that we would even consider mildly good looking.  So we are going to be stuck with the cabinet doors fully on the outside of the face frames.

The stupid European hinges do make the doors much easier to make because they do not require any hand fitting with a bench chisel.  But I really enjoy the hand work.  Plus, I do not think they look nearly as nice as the old half-lap hinges.  Oh well…

The stock that I got for the face frames and the doors is exceptionally good wood.  I bought 4/4 stock and it is a full 7/8 of an inch thick.  (Normally 4/4 stock comes home between 3/4 and 13/16 of an inch thick.)  The problem is, the hinges will only work with face frames that are 13/16 of an inch of thinner.  So I had to plane all this beautiful wood down 1/16 of an inch to get the stupid European hinges to fit it.

It breaks my heart to throw away all that good wood but on the upside, I already have 3 full garbage bags of sawdust (the most useful substance known to man) from this project.  Plus, there is no better smell than the smell of oak or walnut sawdust; The whole house reeks of it right now!  It is wonderful.

On a side note:

Before I started to rip the boards for the face frames, I decided to clean up my tablesaw top with some Boeshield.

If you have not used this stuff, it is absolutely amazing.  It was created by Boeing for use on the machines in their shop, but they started selling to the general public about 10 years ago.  I cannot imagine a lubricant for a tablesaw top that could be better.  I spray it on, them wipe it around with a paper rag and let it dry for 20-30 minutes.  That’s it.  It makes the top very slippery and does not stain the wood (once it is fully dry).

No, Boeing did not pay me anything for the previous paragraph.

Anyway after cleaning up tablesaw, I ripped and cut the face frame boards for a couple cabinets.  Then I drilled and glued them.

Yes – I am using dowel pin joinery on the face frames.  The face frames need to be strong, but they only need to be rock solid strong until they get glued to the carcasses.  Dowel pins give me enough strength and they give me the flexibility to get them absolutely square.

Finally, I got them glued on the carcasses.

I glued the first one up a bit early.  If you look real close in the lower-right of the picture, you can see where the rail and stile of the face frame pulled apart a bit on glue up.  That will not be a big deal as the final sanding will make that mostly disappear.

The second one came out perfect.

Once they were completely dry, they look pretty good.

The blue tape on the side is Tina’s note that she does not need to finish that side because it is going to be butting up to another cabinet.

Lastly, our good friend Eve invited us to help with the fall round up of her cattle the week of 10/16.  Of course we wholeheartedly agreed because how cool is that?!?  Eve’s cowboy Steve, who is in charge of the round up, wanted us to ride with him for half a day just to see how much of a liability we would be.  We apparently passed muster because he told us to show up next Monday.  So in one day (today), we got to sit on the back of a horse at the bottom of a mountain, chase some cows, and go back to M.T Acres and make sawdust!  Am I living the dream or what?

Sorry for not posting last week.  We had family come down to visit from Minnesota and spent the week being tourists.  It was a great time.  We spent 4 days at the Grand Canyon, then spent the rest of the week banging around south-east Arizona, seeing the sights (again) from the perspective of a tourist and just enjoying our kids.  It reminded us (unnecessarily) of why we moved here in the first place.

Last Friday, we picked up my mom in Tucson and took her and our guests out to see M.T. Acres.  The highlight of the day was finding a good sized Mojave Rattler on the back porch.

Mojave Rattlers are more aggressive and more toxic than our usual Diamondback Rattlers.  This one was about 3 feet long and curled up behind some pots Tina keeps on the back porch.  He rattled at Tina just about the time my mom and I were arriving.  So Tina chased him off the porch with the hose and I introduced him to Sturm Ruger.

The final score was: Ruger – 1 Rattler – 0, and that’s all she wrote.  Apparently, a .357 magnum does not care how aggressive or toxic a Mojave Rattler is.

I was scheduled to be working from home this week, but the broker who scheduled my class (and who is a VERY good friend) had some health issues the week before and the schedule fell apart.  So I found myself with an extra week with nothing to do.  That is not a bad thing from the house build perspective because it allowed us to get closer to being back on track schedule-wise for the house build.  But it does introduce a cash-flow constraint since I have now, not earned a single penny in the last 4 weeks.  But I am booked solid through the end of the year (except for the weeks I am scheduled to work on the house and holidays).  Regardless, I am very happy to trade the dollars for the time to keep moving on the house.

Our guests left on Sunday so I went out to M.T. Acres on Monday; Tina came out on Tuesday as she had some things to do back at the rental house.  The first thing I did upon arriving was to check on the status of our dead rattler friend.

In 2 days he was picked absolutely clean!  I am not sure if it was buzzards or crows or some combination, but in 2 days, they picked the carcass completely clean.

That is a very comforting feeling knowing if a hippie shows up at M.T Acres I only have to hide the body for 2-3 days.

This week was dedicated to building the carcasses of the top cabinets for the kitchen on my side and getting the insides of the bottom cabinets finished on Tina’s.

There is a varnish that I have been using for several years on my furniture projects:

https://generalfinishes.com/retail-products/oil-based-topcoats

This stuff is absolutely amazing.  It is applied with a rag rather than a brush.  So there are no brush marks.  It is also absolutely hard as nails.  The problem was, it is insanely expensive if you buy it from a retail store – about $30 per quart!  But the supplier that I ordered the drawer glides and laminate from had it for $40 per gallon, with a 10% discount if you buy 4 or more gallons!  Sign me up!

The other downside is it requires 4-5 coats, as opposed to the 2-3 coats of Minwax varnish.  Plus, it takes about twice as long to dry.

But it sure makes the grain come out.  This is after the first coat Tina did on the inside of the base cabinets.

After 4 coats, it looks like you can put your hand right through it…

The saw marks are obviously my fault.  But they will be covered up by drawer glides.

As for me, I started the week building the biggest of the top cabinets, the corner cabinet.

It was not a terribly difficult thing to build, but its size made it a bit of a challenge to glue up.  I am making most of the top cabinets 42 inches tall and 12 1/2 inches deep.  But for this corner cabinet, I wanted it to be taller and deeper than the standard wall cabinets to break up the monotony of the cabinets.  So I made it 14 1/2 inches deep and 48 inches tall.  That means, this sucker was a real beast to glue.

The next ones I undertook were the cabinet over the cooktop and two skinny cabinets that go on either side of the cooktop.  Fortunately, before I started cutting parts for them, I checked the wall to see where the studs are located to make sure I would have something solid to hang them on.  Unfortunately, as luck would have it, one of the skinny cabinets would not have had a stud behind it.  So my solution was to combine the 3 cabinets into a single cabinet.

Looking at the completed cabinet, the glue up for it looks complicated.  But since it is really just 3 separate cabinets that happen to just share 2 sides, I was able to glue it up in stages.

Part of the problem with glue up is the yellow glue dries so fast due to the thin dry air.  When I was doing this in Minnesota, I had about 20 minutes from the time I applied the glue to get everything in place and clamped.  In Arizona, I have about 10 minutes at most before the glue starts to set up.  When I get to some of the more complicated glue ups on the face frames, I may have to resort to using white glue instead of yellow glue.

This cabinet is 42 inches tall and 12 1/2 inches deep.

Then I built the cabinet that will go above the refrigerator.  It will also be 14 1/2 inches deep and will be hung 6 inches higher than the cooktop cabinet.  (I think the varying depths and heights will make the crown moulding look really cool.)  But this one was the first of 3 that were easy-peasy to make.  It is just a plywood box.

Putting them together along the wall to make sure everything fits…

The cabinet on the right goes above the refrigerator and it will be hung at the same height as the corner cabinet.

And getting a sense for what they will look like depth-wise once I get the face frames on them…

The other thing I did was make the hangers and screw strips for the backs.

The hangers are just a piece of scrap 1/2 inch plywood cut at a 45 degree angle on the bottom glued to the top of the cabinet.  When we go to hang them we can just screw a cleat to the wall and temporarily hang the cabinet from the cleat.  That allows us to get them all aligned exactly how we want them on the wall and screwed together before we run the screws into the studs to support the full weight of the loaded cabinet.  This is also how I built the cabinets for our Minnesota house and I am convinced it saved our marriage.

Then, I got all of the parts machined for the last 2 top cabinets, but I did not get them glued up yet.  (Tina left early on Saturday to go do some chores at the rental house and these are just too big and the glue time is too short to glue them up without somebody else to hold pieces in place during assembly.)  Regardless, glueing them up will go quickly when we go back this weekend.

Finally, our friend Smiley stopped by on Friday and welded up a proper cart for my planer.

This is BIG deal.  The cart that I had it on was one of those designed for hobbyist woodworking machines (I.E. machines weighing around 200 pounds).  This planer is commercial quality and weighs much closer to 400 pounds than 200.  And since I have a LOT of planeing to do in the next couple weeks, this is going to be a lifesaver!

Making kitchen cabinet carcasses is basically an exercise in making a bunch of boxes that fit inside and beside other boxes.  Thus, it is not a terribly difficult process.  But it requires one to think a few steps ahead to make sure all of the parts are going to fit together into a whole.

After getting the corner cabinet done and the under stove cabinet cut last week, I started with the sink cabinet this week.  Sink cabinets can be a pain because there are so many plumbing and electrical connections in them.  I generally just leave a good sized area without a back rather than try to fiddle with cutting each hole in the exact spot.  That makes the whole job much easier, but it does require quite a bit of hand routing.

And if the hand routing is not bad enough, glue-up is a pain because the cabinet is pretty flimsy until I put the face frame on it.  (Sink cabinets cannot have a frame on the top because we need the space to set the sink.)

But once the glue is cured, it fits like a glove.

The light you see on the left side is due to the wall having about a half inch bow under the water pipes from the tapers.  That can be fixed easy enough with about 5 minutes of quality time with my belt sander.

Then it was time to start cutting the parts for the rest of the base cabinets.  Since the gas pipe that I described in last week’s post required me to adjust how I was building the cabinets on that wall, I decided to change how I build the cabinets on the other wall so the face frames will match.

But the first order of business was to make a hole drilling jig for the base cabinets with a shelf.

Yes, the bottom hole is a touch off, but that will not even be seen in the finished cabinet.

After machining the parts, I was able to get the big cabinets glued-up.

My biggest concern was that I did not want to glue-up the 4 drawer cabinets until I had gotten the drawer glides in place and the drawer glides were still “in transit”.  They finally arrived Thursday and I was able to get them installed and do the final glue-up on the base cabinet carcasses.

I finished up glueing in the final few pieces and got the cabinets set in place (but not permanently affixed to the wall).

The wires you see hanging in the foreground are for a center island that I have yet to build.

Th reason for the early post this week is because we have family coming down to see us.  So we will be getting a much needed break from working on work and working on the house.

We finally got to the point in the build that I have been looking forward to since we decided to embark on this enterprise.  Of course, I am talking about building the cabinetry.

Warning: Since I know several regular readers are sawdust heads, for the next few weeks, while I build the cabinets, I will be going into more detail on the process than I normally do.  So, if you do not care about the finer details of how or why I build cabinets the way I do, please feel free to just skim the blog after you get the appropriate mental help for not being a sawdust head in the first place.

This week started off with me getting the rest of my machines unpacked, put together and tuned back to square.

I even got some of my favorite hand saws hung up in my shop.

These are not saws that I use on a regular basis.  A couple belonged to my favorite grandpa, one was my dad’s, one belonged to my grandpa’s best friend and a couple were my grandpa’s brother’s.  I know how to sharpen a hand saw and even have a swedge to set the teeth, so they are all razor sharp.  But I do not use them much.  I just like having them around.

I decided to start the cabinetry with the wall that must be exact.  The blueprints for the house call for a 36 inch corner cabinet followed by a 30 inch cabinet under the cooktop, followed by a 12 inch cabinet.  That would leave exactly 38 inches to fit a 36 inch refrigerator.  So I decided to make those three cabinets first.

The way I make cabinets, I always rough cut the plywood to height first using a circular saw.  I cut them about 1/4 to 1/2 inch long, then cut them to exact size on my tablesaw.

Then I cut out the toe kick.  In this case, I was able to reconfigure a dovetail jig that I made several years ago to cut the toe kick.

I made up a jig to route dados to hold the bottom of the drawer cabinets and a piece to mount the trim on the toe kick.  I obviously cleaned up the corners with a bench chisel.

The next step was to plow the dados to hold the pieces for the drawer glides.

The drawer glide manufacturer does offer a bracket that just mounts to the plywood on the back of the cabinet and the face frame on the front.  But since I am going with 100 pound drawer glides for most of the cabinets and the 200 pound drawer glides under the cooktop, I do not want their strength compromised by how I mounted them.  So crossgrain hardwood is the way I am going.

When building base cabinets, I like to make a pine frame that goes at the top of the cabinet.  It helps to keep everything square during glue up and adds a little more rigidity to the cabinet when installing it.  Obviously, I do not make them for the under-sink cabinet due to space constraints.  But otherwise, it is something I usually do.

Since the frame does not get much stress once the cabinet is complete and installed, I just put them together with a quick dowel joint.

The corner cabinet was the first carcass that I glued up.  A corner cabinet needs to have a plywood top since the top will be visible when the door is open.  I also need it to have a surface to mount the lazy-susan.

Every woodworker has a few things they do to make their work unique.  One of my “signature” things is to cover all the cabinet bottoms, drawer bottoms and shelf tops with Formica.  If you have never worked with Formica, it can be a challenge.  Until it is glued to a surface with contact cement, it tends to tear and chip real easily.

When I built the cabinets for our Minnesota house, I was able to buy Formica in sheets that were 25 inches wide and about 10 feet long.  The 25 inch width made them somewhat manageable to be able to rough cut them to size on the tablesaw, then cut them to finished width using a flush-trim router bit once the Formica was glued to the part.

Unfortunately, this time around, I was only able to get it in 4 by 8 foot sheets.  The 4 foot width makes it very difficult to manage on the tablesaw.   The first sheet I tried to cut on the tablesaw ripped into 6 pieces as soon as I started cutting it.  At almost $60 per sheet, I really do not want to make too many mistakes.  So I began experimenting with other ways to rough cut it.  I found using a tin snips works pretty well if you go slow.

Also, since the house is empty except for our tools, I decided to glue up the corner cabinet in the livingroom to avoid having to build the back corner with a 45 degree angle to fit it through a doorway.

That was when I noticed we have a bit of a problem with the 30 inch cabinet for under Tina’s cooktop.

The gas line for the cooktop comes out right at 30 inches!

My solution was to combine the cooktop cabinet with the skinny 12 inch drawer cabinet.  This allowed me to make the drawer cabinet 11 inches wide and expand the cooktop cabinet to be almost 33 inches wide and still leaves 37 inches for the refrigerator.  It will be close, but I am pretty sure it will work.

I also decided to not use the crossgrain oak for mounting the drawer glides on the left side of the drawers.  That allows me to make the drawers almost the same size that I had planned with my original design.  The drawers are small so I am keeping my fingers crossed that weight will not be a problem.

I have not yet done the final glue up on the drawer side of the cabinet as I am still waiting on the arrival of the drawer glides.  The drawers are too narrow to be able to drill the holes for mounting the drawer glides once the cabinet is glued.

Doing the cabinets this way is how I should have planned it in the first place since it will also allow me to do the face frames the old school way, where I have a single face frame that goes across the front of all of the cabinets.

It will also allow Tina to start finishing the insides of the cabinet carcasses as soon as I get them glued up.  Then I can make the face frame, doors and drawers and get those in place and she finish them separately.  So it should make finishing much easier as well.