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After a long hiatus from shop time thanks to Indiana’s stay-at-home directive, I’ve been back in full force over the past two weeks. Sure, I could have kept working on the kitchen — my shop is next to our house. But why turn my work area into a life-size game of Tetris with cabinets as playing pieces a moment before that crowding was really necessary? Better to leave the roughsawn oak and sheets of plywood flat until we could firm up the schedule for delivery and installation.

Every kitchen I’ve worked on has entailed a few changes along the way. I do my best to help clients make the most important decisions early on. I also encourage them not just to order their plumbing fixtures and appliances, but to have them on hand before I start to cut materials, because reworking cabinets can get expensive quickly.

On this job we’ve done a lot of things differently because of the ongoing pandemic. With no clear idea how long the stay-at-home directive was going to last, my clients, Jenny and Ben, were in less of a hurry to order appliances, etc. and have them delivered — they’ve been working full-time from home in the company of their three children, whose schools were closed for in-person classes. Ordinarily we would have met to discuss a few questions that have cropped up; instead, we’ve hammered things out by email and phone. I’ve dropped off samples of milk paint at their back door. Everything has been slightly off — at times, surreal.

Our only recent meeting in person took place at a local stone yard, where Jenny and Ben fell in love with a slab of medium-gray soapstone. Compared to other stone, such as granite, this one is relatively soft, so I wanted them to be aware of how it would likely age. I sent snapshots from our kitchen, which has pale gray soapstone counters, and emphasized that even though we treat our counters with care, there’s significant wear along the front edge at the sink. This stone would require extra coddling.

They weighed my warnings. Then, intoxicated by the beauty of the stone, they concluded they had to have it.

To compensate, they decided to use a different kind of sink. The plans included an undermount sink, but after seeing pictures of our counter, Ben and Jenny decided to buy an enameled cast iron apron front, to do away with the especially vulnerable strip of stone across the front. Good thing I hadn’t started building the cabinets — not only did this change the doors from full height to more like 20″; it also meant the sink base would have to be 2″ longer.

The second major change has been to the kitchen’s inside corner. In our earliest discussions I’d gone through my usual reasons for recommending a simple stack of drawers instead of attempting to use the blind space that would otherwise be wasted, but Ben and Jenny decided to go with a corner optimizer.

Full disclosure: I had never installed one of these units, which I first learned of thanks to Craig Regan. It seemed like a better choice than the half-moon blind corner pull-out I once experimented with in my own kitchen (more about this in my forthcoming book); it’s sturdy, better looking and smooth in operation. But once I had it in the cabinet I could see trouble down the line: Unless you’re meticulous about pulling the unit straight out and extending it fully before you pull the second half forward, the face frame of the corner cabinet and the face of the cabinet next to it would get scratched and banged up in short order. For a family of five who really use their kitchen, it seemed like a bad idea.

I thought through every likely scenario with the corner optimizer and decided to recommend we nix it in favor of some intelligently-designed, fully-functional drawers; depending on what we discover during demolition, the blind area in the corner will probably become a storage cabinet in the wall flanking the stairs to the basement.

To those who complain about old-timers being unwilling to change/jump on the bandwagon of The Newest And Greatest Thing, I offer this story as one reason why some of us whose livelihood depends on this kind of work prefer to recommend the products we know well. We’re not being lazy, fearful or unimaginative. We might have learned something over the decades from our mistakes. In the future, if clients ask me about the advisability of using a corner optimizer such as this one (and I am aware that this is not the only style available), I will factor what I know about how they use their kitchen into my response, as I do with every other detail of kitchen design.

If anyone would like to buy this 15″ blind corner unit at a discount (it makes a great climbing frame/nap place/carnival ride for a cat), let me know in the comments.

–Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

An excerpt from “Calvin Cobb – Radio Woodworker: A Novel with Measured Drawings,” by Roy Underhill.

Banging buckets echoed down the hall from the clock tower entrance. The painter was done for the day. The stacks of ordered papers on Calvin’s desk no longer made sense, and he gathered them into a single pile.

“I’ll be up in the lab,” he called into Linda’s office as he escaped down the hall. He drummed up the stairs to the ninth floor and walked to the door squeezed between two empty storerooms. He crouched slightly as he passed down the short corridor that led into the square base of the clock tower, but once he emerged into the room, he could stand twenty feet tall if he wanted. Four huge frosted glass clock faces crowned the upper walls of the chamber. Four shafts driving the clock hands converged overhead with bevel gears that doled out the seconds from the clockwork on the floor above. Visitors felt tiny beneath the giant clock faces — smaller than mice in a grandfather clock. But the sense of being inside something intentional, something measured and deliberate, appealed powerfully to Calvin.

Slit windows in the walls, narrow like archer’s loopholes in a castle, gave views of each compass point. Calvin peered through the east window by his workbench. With the trees not fully leafed out yet, he could still see the mottos chiseled into the facade of the new Justice Department building up the street. In large letters under the window of the FBI director’s office were the words “No free Government can survive that” — a disturbing statement if you missed the subsequent “is Not based on the supremacy of law” that continued around the corner.

Those FBI men up Pennsylvania Avenue were, in part, responsible for the stack of golden-hued, white oak boards leaning against the wall beside Calvin’s workbench. He had salvaged this mellow timber with growth rings as tight as a deck of cards from the demolished cabinetry on the atrium floor far below. The cabinetry had all been purpose-made in the 1880s as specialized organs to digest the United states mail — oak cubby-hole kidneys for insufficient address, oak hopper-table livers for postage due. But after the postal operations moved out in the summer of 1934, the FBI moved in, waiting for the completion of their new building up the street. They demanded uniform desks in uniform ranks and broke up the oak woodwork in the atrium with fire axes and stacked it for the dump, exposing embarrassing rectangular outlines on the marble floors where ten thousand nightly moppings had left fossil seashores of filth. Calvin, staying late in the evenings, had rescued as many planks as he could and given them sanctuary in the tower.

He unlocked his wall-mounted tool cupboard and took a plane from the shelf. The cabinet had belonged to a European master stamp engraver and some of his old prints were still tacked to the doors; Dürer’s the Knight, Death and the Devil on one, and on the other, an unknown eighteenth-century engraver’s Virtue Fleeing from Décolletage, showing a young man pursued down a flight of stairs by a quartet of busty young beauties in spectacularly low-cut gowns.

This afternoon, with everyone else ready to slip from the iceberg, he lifted a plank still bearing shreds of varnish and deeply stained with purple ink, and laid it on the workbench. He took up his jack plane and went to his compulsive work. The old surfaces — stabbed by angry clerks, passed over by millions of love letters, bank orders, Christmas cards, draft notices, invitations and regrets fell in corkscrew shavings to the floor. He finished planing the long board and resumed his work on a glass-fronted wall cabinet for Linda’s stacks of punched cards. he cranked his bit-brace auger, turning the center bit into the oak to rough in a mortise. “Why do you choose a center bit for this work Mr. Cobb?” he asked himself in a high and barely audible voice.

“Well, Miss Harper, for a shallow hole, a center bit actually cuts faster,” he answered himself. Tan shavings wound out-ward in an unbroken spiral. The central pike of the bit poked through the far side of the plank. He turned the plank over and inserted the center pike into the hole, and bored down again until the bit pushed into open space, carrying with it a speared button of oak.

He worked until the sunlight rectangles cutting through the slit-windows of the castle grew rust-red. Out the dusty west window, a deep sun fired diagonal rows of clouds into scarlet furrows that left the Washington monument in stark silhouette. A bunt of his hand knocked the shavings out of the rabbet plane and he locked it and the other tools back in the cabinet. Closing the cabinet left him facing the old engravings tacked to the door faces. He stared at one of the lusty women in Virtue Fleeing from Décolletage. He would find a set of colored pencils. He would color her eyes Delft blue.

If you registered for a 2020 class at LAP, then you know from your email that we recently made the difficult decision to cancel all remaining classes for 2020. And I appreciate the kind notes you’ve sent in return – many of you offered to donate your registration fee (which warmed the cockles of my semi-frozen heart) or ask if it could be applied to a new class in the future. And you’ve asked about classes in the future in general.

I’m responding to all questions (I hope!) at once, here.

First, thank you to those who generously offered to let us keep the fee. We greatly appreciate the offer, but we simply wouldn’t feel right doing that – so expect to see those refunds in your accounts soon.

And as far as applying that registration fee to future classes…I’m afraid simply haven’t the organizational skills to make that happen. So again,expect to see those refunds in your accounts soon.

I do, however, have organizational skills enough to make sure that when we do offer classes again, anyone who was signed up for a cancelled 2020 class gets a priority shot at a like class when we are able to invite folks back. So yes to that.

And finally, yes, we do plan to offer classes again – when it’s safe for everyone. As always, stay tuned to the blog; fingers crossed I’ll have good news on that front later this year.

Thanks for your continued support.

— Fitz