Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth! It’s been a minute since we posted, and that’s because not much has been going on at the house. However, we’ve been making slow progress here and there so it’s time to catch up. Here’s a pic from the crew from work at our BBQ party last Friday. Before holidays we like to shut down the day before at lunch and have some BBQ.

We went to Hawaii

For those that don’t know, Oceana was born and raised in Hawaii. Her parents moved back to the mainland when she was 16. However, a few years ago her parents and younger sister moved back to Hawaii and have been inviting us to come visit every since. We finally went to visit. This was my first trip to Hawaii. It’s beautiful there. We enjoyed trying all of the local cuisine as well as doing some sightseeing and lots of snorkeling. On the volcano side of the island, it got down into the 50s at night. Coming from the Florida heat, that was awesome!

The garden fence

Last post we built a fence around Oceana’s garden. After letting the wood dry out a bit, we stained it to match the house. We used a solid color stain (it looks like paint, but it’s actually a stain) and used a sprayer to spray the whole thing white. Once the white was sprayed, we went back through and cut in the blue for the top cap and the posts. Lastly, Oceana touched up the white as necessary. The end result is awesome. We really like it!

Lake work day

Last Saturday I was invited to a work day to remove another dead tree from the lane. It seems that someone used herbicide around the base of the trees and so far it’s killed two of them. Tom and his son Richard used the tractor and a platform to drop the tree limbs to the ground while a few of us gathered them into piles to be moved by the tractor. Using the tractor, Tom loaded the tree stump onto my flatbed so that I can make some lumber with my sawmill. After all of the branches were cleared out, Joe brought over his stump grinder and ground down the remnants of the tree. Good work by all but sad to see it come down.

The kitchen cabinets

The much overdue time has come to get started on our kitchen cabinets. We tore out our old kitchen over a year ago and have been living in a makeshift kitchen ever since. As I’m going to build our cabinets, I need materials to do so. There are no cabinet material suppliers near us. So on my last trip to West Palm Beach, I made time to stop at a few of my old suppliers there to pick up the plywood and lacquer for the cabinets. Now with the materials on hand, it was time to get started.

Finally got the material

I’m starting with the base cabinets first. I figure we can get them installed and functional and then do the uppers next. Using a track saw and a large work bench, I cut all of the plywood pieces to size. For the cabinets, I’m using pre-finished plywood. As it sounds, this plywood has already had a finish applied to one or both sides (I’ve got some of each). It’s great for cabinet interiors so that you don’t have to apply a finish to the interiors. The first step was building the cabinet boxes. This is the basic structure of the cabinet. With the boxes built, I then built the toe kicks that the cabinets sit on. I then attach the toe kicks to the cabinet boxes.

Lots of drawers

With the toe kicks screwed to the boxes, it was time to start on the drawers and pull outs. For a small kitchen, there’s lots of drawers. 15 in total. I’m using the same prefinished plywood to build the drawers from. However, since it’s plywood, you’d see the raw edge of the plywood exposed on the top edge of the drawer because only the faces are prefinished. To remedy this, I apply an iron on prefinished edgeband to the top edge of the drawer parts. I opted to do this to the strips of plywood that I cut that aren’t cut to the specific drawer sizes yet. It’s much faster to do one eight foot piece then four two foot pieces. Once the edgeband was applied, I then cut all the parts to size.

Installing the drawers

With a big pile of parts, I got all of the drawer boxes assembled. All 15 of them. Next up is installing them into the cabinet boxes. I started with the two smaller base cabinets. These will go on either side of the oven. One will be a full drawer base (all drawers have their own fronts) while the other will have a drawer up top and a door below. Behind the door are two pull out drawers. You can see that one side of the drawers has been padded in. This is to clear the cabinet door hinges. Lots of planning and details in building these cabinets.

That’s all, folks

There are two more cabinets left to install drawers and pull outs into. I’ll get to those next. Once they’re done, then I can begin building the face frames and cabinet doors. Progress! That’s all for now.