I Might Just Love This Kitchen

That’s right! I got shelves up in this piece! Hope you enjoy the pictures of us making shelves as much as we are enjoying having them.

This is two pieces of Baltic birch plywood that are going to be the shelves, window sill, and cabinet drawers/doors in our new kitchen.

This is me, in work drag, running some of the birch through a surface planer. I needed the shelves to be 1″ thick, but the stock was 5/8 inch. So…I glued it up (laminated it, as they say), then trucked it out to my grandpa’s place to use his 12″ surface planer. Hi Grandpa! Thanks for letting me use your planer!

This is the birch veneer that we used to make the exposed edge of the shelves purdy. I was skeptical about this stuff, but my pop promised that it was easy as pie to use and would really pro-up the look of things. As usual, poppy was right.

Heh, did I mention that it irons on???

I tend not to care for polyurethane. I generally prefer penetrating sealers like tung oil or boiled linseed oil - even varnish. However, when push comes to shove, I have to admit that poly makes for the most durable surface - and I really don’t want to refinish these damned things too often. So we (Jason…) sanded the shelves at a 15o-grit finish, then I did two thin coats of poly with a 220-grit wet-sand between coats. I was ready to do a third coat, but the second was so smooth and nice that we decided to leave well-enough alone.

While I was putting the finish coats on the shelves and sill, Jason was busy smoothing the edges that we had to cut from the cabinet frame faces in order to accommodate the euro-style hinges we’ll use to get a fully-faced cabinet door. He also used the random orbital sander to rough up the finish on the cabinet frames before he painted them to match the color of the wall behind them.

You can see here that the cabinet faces are all painted and BEHOLD! The first shelf is hanging! Our friend Sean (yeah, the peach who re-wired our kitchen) stopped by Sunday night while Jason was out with the boys. He graciously volunteered to help Katie and I hang the shelves, so I handed him the drill and poured us all drinks. Katie and I installed a rosy drunk while Sean-O installed the shelves. Sean FTMFW, as usual.

Here Sean demonstrates his keen sense of prioritization, putting the jumbo bottle of Cholula in the place of honor on the first shelf.

Katie and Sean FTW.

Fancypants LED disk lights hung under the new shelves.

All manner of task lighting up in here.

Before we get to the money shot, so to speak, I’ll take this opportunity to show off the new window sill that I MADE WITH MY OWN HANDS! Notice the really fly edge on that wood - yeah, that’s veneer! that I put on with a fucking clothes iron! on plywood! I wanted this to be VERY durable, as I’m likely to put plants and my ass in this window sill…so, instead of finishing it with poly like everything else, I did just one quick coat of poly to seal things up, then applied an epoxy resin called Envirotex Lite. This stuff is fabulous. I can’t stop thinking about decoupaging every surface in my house with wine labels under a glossy coat of epoxy…but I digress.

How about that!?!

and that???

I cooked actual food in here tonight!

This is the beginning of something wonderful…