New Counter for the Kitchenadding to our work spaceDecember 29: Now that the cabin is closed in, we'll be shifting our afternoon work sessions over to making improvements in the kitchen.
The goal of the next few months will be to get work underway on the kitchen's shower room, but there's a couple of projects that need attending to in order to get that going since there's currently this huge marble slab parked in the bathroom.
It's the "thermal sink" that we'll use to make temperature sensistive products like fudge and pie crusts, but rather than just shuffle it out of the way to some other place, we figure it's time to get it installed and usable. The four foot by two foot by four inch thick slab of marble will be mounted on a dolly so that it can be rolled out when needed, and then rolled back under the counter and out of the way of the cooks when it not needed.
This required that the counter top that "houses" the slab be designed so that it doesn't have any center supports, so the design is a bit out of the ordinary--which is sort of par for how we do things, but hey, it's our kitchen and we want it to be both productive and pretty :-) For added strength, the members where half-laped, glued and screwed with the result that the frame work is rock solid and easily supports the weight of an adult. Folks aren't supposed to stand on counters to clean the ceiling, but we figure it never hurts to build in some extra strength. December 30: The next step involved cladding the frame with 1/2" plywood. Once that was glued and screwed into place, the frame was slid into place to await the fitting of the counter top.
December 31: Not doing a whole lot today other than enjoying the year end with friends, but before we gather together this evening, I wanted to at least get the counter cut and inplace so that the kitchen crew could use it tomorrow for our tradition New Year's lunch.
The only way I know to make a truly straight cut with a power saw is to set up a cutting fence to guide the saw, especially when you're having to transition from one surface to another that's at 90° from the first. It takes a bit of time to put together the fence, but it's better to invest the time and get the cut right than have to look, day after day, at a sloppy cut.
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