Refinishing a kitchen

     I refinished a kitchen today and yesterday. I built this kitchen ten years ago, back when I only wanted to use shellac flakes dissolved in denatured alcohol as a finish. No fumes for me, no polyurethane or penetrating oil please. I was so anti-toxic finish, yet I used plastic laminated MDF as the carcass material. I never used MDF again after this project. Not only was it extremely toxic when cut but it was fucking heavy. I remember getting our boys and a couple of their friends to help lift the cabinets into the truck and then into the house. 

     This was one of my first kitchens, I bought the maple at Almquist Lumber. They had a fresh shipment of locally milled (local to Humboldt) maple limbs cut into one inch boards. The wood was full of interesting qualities. There was spalt, fiddle back, live edges, quilting and more. I had fun resawing the wood and matching the book-matched grain. There is so much character in every one of the panels, I was a joy seeing them today after a decade.

     Check  out my flickr site if you are interested in how I refinished these cabinets.

   

Horizontal or Vertical

   I don't know why I feel the urge to write down what I am doing in life, but for some reason I do. I've been keeping a journal since I was 10 years old. I work alone most of the time and enjoy figuring out how to accomplished woodworking tasks. All of my projects are custom and I rarely use the same kind of material. Sometimes its plywood and store bought lumber already planed and jointed, other times its material from a stock pile of lumber salvaged from old wooden gates or feeding troughs, or maybe some painted siding from an historic building.
     My current project is a bathroom cabinet made from maple milled on the land the house is sitting on.  I used most of the wood already on the kitchen, vanity cabinets, the breakfast nook and the window seat. Now I am picking through the remains. Mostly 2 inch slabs that are bowed, twisted, checked, warped... you name it, these are the culls from the other projects.
    I had some left over panels and offcuts that were long enough to use if they were horizontal, I intended to have vertical panels. I made the panels and dadoed the frame to find that I was about 2 boards shy. I spaced the boards to see if that looked good, I slid them together, I tried to randomize the colors so there was no pattern. I didn't like any of them.  I don't know if it's the different colors of wood or that they are side-ways instead of up and down. It's been probably two weeks now and I need to gat back on it. Temperature in the shop is in the low 40's so that makes it hard to get motivated to work in there.
   Here is a link to the Mattole Craftsmen Flickr site for this project.