a custom curly maple kitchen

ok, we're coming along on the custom kitchen i first wrote about when i visited the slate mill back in august. this job was a little bit of a surprise for me, even though we built the kitchen island in the adjacent room back in march and april. anyway, by the time it came our way, it was too late to proceed in the normal manner, which is to install the cabinets and then make the templates for the slate counters. because of a tight timeline involving a large fundraising party on the 29th of this month, we had to make the templates and hand them off and then finish the cabinets and install them. it's a little nerve wracking, making sure everything adds up, but i think we've got it now. click the photos to enlarge them ...
here's where we are as of yesterday. trevor hass prefinished the door panels and frames and he'll glue up the doors and end panels today. we should have everything pretty much finished and fitted up by the end of this week. that is, if the drawers by stratton creek arrive on schedule. we've been using stratton creek for a few years any time we have a bunch of big drawers and not as much time or budget as we need. they do a great economical and timely job for less than we can even think about doing them .. they also do through dovetails, which look as handcut as any premade drawer i've seen.

so, here's the process ... we built the rough boxes and made the templates from our cad drawings

and took them to the job site, checked everything, and handed off the templates to the slate guys ... there is, to make it even trickier, a large 42 x 21 all slate, two level sink that has to be fabricated in maine. to facilitate this, we actually made two mdf sink mockups from 1" material, same as the slate, and sent one off to maine. just for fun, there's and angled wall and an installation quirk to deal with. the sink will be too heavy to drop into the hole, and the door beneath is is too small to slide it into place from below. so, we have decided to fit up the doors and angled face frames, but not glue them to the cabinets until the sink is installed. it's a little anxiety producing to contemplate, given the minimal counter overhangs on the sink and the then necessary exact sink placement and a million other things, but having the two identical mockups eases the mind ... somewhat ... i don't even want to think how much the finished counter is going to weigh.

it should work ...

back to the shop with the cabinets

start the mostly glass single upper cabinet ... that will be about 8 feet long and about 48 inches wide when it's finished and will be assembled on site.

and then there's the undercounter oven ... we could not make any sense of the online descriptions, but fortunately, the appliance supplier was able to get it for us so we could have it here to figure it out. NOT straightforward ...

then we needed some crown moldings, which typically we make ourselves ...

we run the shape and then glue on backing pieces so we can attach the molding without visible fasteners ... it takes a minute, but is worth the effort.

it's just a bunch of 45 degree table saw set ups ... more pictures coming as we finish it up ...