Progress and Setbacks

We have made some significant progress on the countertop over the last few days, but also struggled through setbacks at every step. We feel sometimes like we’re inventing the wheel, but we’re plowing forward.

Step 1 was to build a template using strips of 1/4” mahogany lauan underlay. We started with a sheet of 1/8” melamine which was truly sucktastic. It was so flimsy, we had a really hard time ripping it into strips.

Once you get usable strips, you lay a piece against the wall, then put another one in the front taking into account how much the counter will overhang the cabinetry. Tack these down and then hot glue the side pieces into place. Each piece is left intentionally 1/2” short in each direction so you don’t have to mess with cutting them exactly to length. This is an important step in the process because, guess what, the walls in your house are never true, and your cabinetry is never square.

We also used our handy dandy, super duper polisher of joy. You start with a 50 grit diamond resin pad on the wet polisher and work your way up to 3000 grit. It is wicked smooth when finished - we just kept rubbing the samples after they were polished. This is about what the finished color should look like, except we bought these shiny, white, small stones to place in the form. These will show up as larger aggregate when polished.

We moved the template outside and laid it out on 3/4” melamine to mark the cuts for the base of the form. Because the bottom of the form will be the top of the counter, it is quite important to flip the template upside down.

To keep things straight in our constantly confused heads, we made marks on the template when it was inside with black sharpie and then switched to red sharpie when we flipped it upside down.

The pieces were ripped using a circular saw with a jerry rigged guide. We couldn’t use a table saw because nothing in the existing kitchen is square. I should mention that it was WINDY this day. We were engulfed in mini cyclones of sawdust and every time we tried to move a piece, we were working against a sail.

Suckers – Cameron and Kyle thought they were visiting for a vacation, but we put them to work immediately.

We also built and leveled a pour table. This should have been an easy part of the process, but we tried building it on sawhorses first so it would be at waist height for all of the successive steps. Nice idea, but the plastic sawhorses we had deflected horribly as soon as you put weight on them (specifically, the weight of Tom). The pour table has to be level and can’t deflect when the weight of the concrete is on it (about 800 pounds for the entire thing).

So, the pour table was moved to the floor. FYI, this whole thing has to be done inside because concrete needs to cure in 50 degrees or warmer for 3 days. Tom had a fantastic time shimming the table – twice. First round was a learning experience, second round he got it right. We really enjoy doing things twice for no reason.

On one of our many, many, many shopping trips to hardware stores, I spotted this crazy vehicle. Do you think it’s blue book value is higher with the custom paint and bobblehead job?

-Jessie