Proper proportions. This Shaker classic is one of the best examples of how frame components can influence the character of a cabinet. While the board between the doors does not exactly qualify as a face frame stile, that is one of its functions. Contrast its extreme width with the single-board thickness of the rails between the drawers. (Private collection, Paul Rocheleau)
Unlike most kitchen design books, “Kitchen Think” is a woodworker’s guide to designing and furnishing the kitchen, from a down-to-the-studs renovation to refacing existing cabinets. And she shows you how it can be done without spending a fortune or adding significantly to your local landfill.
Yes, there are hundreds of pretty full-color photos of well-designed kitchens, which are organized into 24 case studies throughout the book. They range from the sculptural (kitchens by Johnny Grey and Wharton Esherick) to kitchens of a more recognizable form.
But there’s also a heavy dose of practical instruction: how to build cabinets efficiently, how to make a basic kitchen island, how to build a wall-hung plate rack. Plus butt-saving advice that comes only from experience – like how to maximize space in inside corners, how to scribe cabinets and countertops into odd spaces and how to make sure you’ve left ample space for hardware.
All of this is built on a foundation of research into kitchens from the past. Hiller’s historical perspective on design might just change your mind about what makes a good kitchen.
Widths of door stiles & rails Bottom rails are almost always wider than top rails on old cabinet and furniture doors. Sometimes stiles are the same width as the top rail (before material is removed for fitting the doors), sometimes not – and sometimes they are dramatically different.
Dimensions of face frame stiles and rails (in addition to where they appear) For example, a true period look for cabinets predating the widespread use of mechanical drawer slides requires intermediate drawer rails. Even if you plan to mount your drawers on full-extension slides, you should incorporate rails between them to evoke the look of those that once supported web frames.
Style is cyclical. The pulls on these metal cabinets found in a garage inspired those Lynette Breton made for her mid-century style kitchen. She made the concave handle detail with a router with a shop-made jig, using a rub collar and core box bit. Before using the router, she bored out the center on the drill press to give the bit a place to plunge into. The core box bit removed the remainder of the waste. The process was more nerve-racking than it might have been because she did this routing after painting the cabinets. The pulls in the center are Bakelite with chrome from Vintage Hardware in Port Townsend, Wash. (vintagehardware.com). (Margaret Stevens Becksvoort)
Hardware What kind of hinges were used, and how were they attached? If the doors were hung on butt hinges, were they mortised into the door and face frame, or only into the door? What is the length of the hinge? How wide are the leaves? Are the pins removable or fixed, and do they have finials? What is the finish?
Hardware position Note the distance of the top and bottom (and center, if applicable) hinges from the ends of the door. Note the position of drawer pulls, doorknobs or latches; door hardware was commonly installed approximately halfway or two-thirds to three-quarters of the way up on base cabinet doors and similarly spaced in the opposite direction for upper doors. They were not usually located in the upper or lower corner, as is typical of cabinet doors today.
Set correctly. When we recreated the pantry in Lauri Hafvenstein’s 1917 house, I followed the original pattern Lauri had seen in a neighbor’s kitchen, with inset doors and half-inset drawer faces.(Lauri Hafvenstein)
Are doors and drawers inset, overlay or half inset? Drawer faces were sometimes half inset even though the doors in the same set of cabinets were fully inset.
Moulding profiles It should go without saying that moulding profiles are important. They can vary enormously and are one of the most distinctive and delightful details in a period kitchen. If you cannot replicate a profile yourself, you can usually have it done in the species of your choice by a millwork shop willing to custom-grind knives. Just be sure you order extra, as there will usually be a hefty set-up charge along with the grinding fee, and different batches can have dimensional variations invisible to the eye but great enough to cause headaches during installation.
Edge treatment of half inset drawer faces These may be eased, quarter-round, beveled or moulded.
Graduated. Notice the proportions of door elements in this elevation of a pantry “dresser” from an 1899 carpenter’s guide. (A gift to the author from Charles Bickford)
Proportions of graduated drawers Along with the proportions of face frames and door components, one of the least-noticed and most critical aspects of historic kitchens is the proportions of drawer faces. Many cabinetmakers make the mistake of building all the drawer faces in a stack to the same size. Not only does this look terrible, because when viewed from above (i.e., from normal standing height), the bottom drawer will inevitably look smaller than the rest, and so, out of scale. It’s also not how drawers were traditionally sized. You can make as many adverse comparisons as you like between 19th-century cabinetmakers and the furniture made by those who worked in the golden zone of northeastern American states during the late 18th century, but even oft-maligned Victorians worked with a tradition grounded in classical proportions. This was one of the first and most important lessons I learned from Roy Griffiths in 1980.
Toe kicks. Flush toe kicks were an option in 1927, and still are today. (1927 Universal millwork catalog)
Toe kicks Are they flush (i.e., does the bottom rail of the face frame go all the way to the floor) or recessed? If the toe kick is partially recessed – i.e., if the face frame stiles extend down to the floor with inset toe kicks between them – note the rhythm of this variation. In some cases the stiles are full-length only at the end of each cabinet run, with the kick recessed everywhere else. In others, the stiles may run down to the floor on each cabinet.
Katherine has cooked up another big batch of Soft Wax 2.0, a safe and beautiful finish that I use on all my chairs and much of my casework. It is available for sale in her etsy store.
Katherine makes the wax in our machine room using a waterless process and then packages it in durable glass jars with coated metal lids. The result: no rust or discoloration.
As always, Katherine has Bean the Shop Cat by her side. Here he is playing with his new (thank you, Megan) scratching post. This is not the most flattering photo of the poor boy, but….
Instructions for Soft Wax 2.0
Soft Wax 2.0 is a safe finish for bare wood that is incredibly easy to apply and imparts a beautiful low luster to the wood.
The finish is made by cooking raw, organic linseed oil (from the flax plant) and combining it with cosmetics-grade beeswax and a small amount of a citrus-based solvent. The result is that this finish can be applied without special safety equipment, such as a respirator. The only safety caution is to dry the rags out flat you used to apply before throwing them away. (All linseed oil generates heat as it cures, and there is a small but real chance of the rags catching fire if they are bunched up while wet.)
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS (VERY IMPORTANT): Applying Soft Wax 2.0 is so easy if you follow the simple instructions. On bare wood, apply a thin coat of soft wax using a rag, applicator pad, 3M gray pad or steel wool. Allow the finish to soak in about 15 minutes. Then, with a clean rag or towel, wipe the entire surface until it feels dry. Do not leave any excess finish on the surface. If you do leave some behind, the wood will get gummy and sticky.
The finish will be dry enough to use in a couple hours. After a couple weeks, the oil will be fully cured. After that, you can add a second coat (or not). A second coat will add more sheen and a little more protection to the wood.
Soft Wax 2.0 is made in small batches in Kentucky using a waterless process. Each glass jar contains 8 oz. of soft wax, enough for two chairs.
Our “Family Tree of Chairs” letterpress poster is now available in our store. There are only 200 available. So if you want one, don’t tarry. If these sell out, we will consider doing another run in a different ink color, such as green or brown.
Also, our next generation of woodworking pencils are also available today here. A box of five in a nicely printed box is available for $12. These pencils are made to our specifications in the USA. We have been testing different pencil configurations for months. These pencils are robust, make a good mark and sharpen easily.
Finally, some customers have asked to purchase replacement handles for our lump hammer, mostly to have a spare on hand in case the handle ever breaks. The hickory handle is a custom shape that requires both turning and handwork. It ships with oak and metal wedges for installing the head. You can read the details here.
Note: This entry has been updated to fix an embarrassing geometry mistake. The repaired paragraphs are in italics.
Wedges for stick chairs must absorb a lot of shock so they don’t snap when you install them. So I steer clear of weak (sycamore) or brittle (ebony) woods.
Most of my wedges are oak or ash, species that are plentiful and inexpensive. I don’t think I’ve ever snapped an oak or ash wedge, even when I’ve struck them at odd angles. I have used walnut and cherry wedges at the request of customers. They work, but you have to be deliberate when hammering them in because they will snap.
The grain in a wedge should run along its length, from its thin tip to its fat end. For chairs, I use wedges that are 1-1/2″ long. The fat end is between 1/8″ and 1/4″ thick. The tip comes to a sharp point. If I need a blunt tip for some reason (say the tenon is loose and shallow), I’ll snip off the pointiness.
The angle of the wedges I use is usually somewhere between 4° and 10°. The shallower angles are easier to hammer in, but the wedge is more likely to crack. A wedge with a larger included angle can cause the wedge to bounce out of the tenon when you hammer it in. The solution is either to hit the wedge harder until the wedge hopefully grabs, or switch to a wedge with a smaller included angle.
Wedges with included angles smaller than 4° can work, but the wedge is even more likely to snap off when struck.
Wedges With & Without a Sled
You can make wedges without a jig on the band saw by using the saw’s miter gauge. Crosscut a 5/8″ x 1-1/2″-long chYou can make wedges without a jig on the band saw by using the saw’s miter gauge. Crosscut a 5/8″ x 1-1/2″-long chunk off a board that is about 6″ wide. Set the saw’s miter gauge to cut on-half of the angle you desire (i.e. 5° off 90° for a 10° wedge). Put the chunk on the miter gauge and cut off a thin sliver. Flip the chunk over – end grain-for-end grain. Slide the chunk toward the blade and make another cut.
You will quickly figure out where to place the chunk so that you make a perfect wedge. You can make wedges with thin points and blunt points.
Keep flipping the chunk over and over. Make wedges until your chunk is so small that it feels dangerous to make the cut while so close to the saw’s blade.
You can also make a dedicated wedge jig for the band saw’s miter slot that has zero clearance to the blade. This jig is shown above. It is permanently set at 5° off 90° and makes it easy to position the chunk of wood and slice a perfect 10° wedge.
The disadvantage to both of these miter-gauge methods is also its advantage. The technique makes it easy to make different wedges. By moving the chunk of wood left or right on the miter gauge, you can make wedges that are fatter or skinnier.
The Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection (at least, most of it) now lives in Nancy Hiller’s office. The whisk brush was made by Aspen Golann.
After a small flurry of emails this past weekend related to the dust jacket in which Nancy, Christopher, Megan and I discussed word choice, the number of lines, the space between “Shop” and “Tails” and more, “Shop Tails” is now at the printer.
Makers, whether of a dust jacket, a book, a spoon or a kitchen, tend to eschew materialism, or, at least certain types of materialism. And yet we make material goods. As Nancy writes below, the “things vs people” dichotomy can be false and destructive, and that holds true whether you’re talking about a person on a factory production line or someone working in a one-person workshop.
In this excerpt from Chapter 11, Winnie (1996-2010), Nancy addresses the concept of materialism, and suggests considering a new way of looking at objects – appreciating how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
When Winnie, William, Lizzie, Tom and I officially moved into the house next to my shop in the winter of 2004-2005, I kept the dogs confined to the laundry room and kitchen instead of giving them free run of the house. Not only was I loath to see any repeat of the destruction at my bungalow in town; I had begun laying the hickory floors in my spare time, and it was an unimaginably slow job, done on my hands and knees.
Alan had kindly loaned me a flooring nailer. It was the manual type you whack with a dead-blow mallet. I tried it repeatedly, but the hickory was so hard it just bent the nails. Once a nail was bent, it was far more time-consuming to remove from the dense wood than it would have been to drive by hand. A pneumatic nailer might have done the trick, but I didn’t have one, so I bought several pounds of large finish nails and recalibrated my expectations. I had to pre-drill the tongue of each board about every 18 inches along its length to keep it from splitting. I drove the nails with a hammer and finished with a nail set. It took a week of spare time to lay the floor in the 13 x 18-foot living room, but as I watched the hickory spread slowly across the OSB subfloor, I was thrilled by the transformation in my surroundings.
After the living room I moved down the hall to the bedrooms, then hired my friend John Hewett to sand the floors. I applied two coats of Waterlox Original tung oil just before driving to Florida with a kitchen full of cabinets for Maggie and her husband – the tung oil was so heavy on the solvent that I didn’t want to be in the house while it cured.
Considering how much work the floors took, I was not about to see them scratched up by the dogs’ claws, so I decided to confine them to the kitchen and laundry room, rather than allowing them the run of the house.
***
Every so often someone complains that I’m too protective of material artifacts, whether the floors in my house, the top of our kitchen table or the quilt made by our friend Kim, a gift when Mark and I were married – “Use the delicate cycle! Those are Kim’s hand-sewn stitches!” These criticisms, which are often veiled, pit things against people (or things against dogs, in the case of my floors), implying that I value the former over the latter.
I get it. When I was around 10, Esse, gave me a melodica, a hybrid between a wind instrument and a keyboard. You blew into a mouthpiece, pressing keys to produce different notes. The resulting sound struck me as artificial, and the instrument itself was mostly made of plastic. It didn’t seem like a serious instrument. I had no idea back then that the melodica was good enough for the coolest of professional musicians, like Jon Batiste on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” I was touched that she’d bought it for me, but not that interested in learning to play it.
The gift of the melodica coincided with the influx of hippies living in our yard. From them I learned that attachment to material things was bad. “You gotta let it go, man. Free yourself,” they’d say – not about my melodica, but about other, grown-up things. Their happiness living with few possessions impressed me. I wanted to follow their example. So one Saturday morning, when a couple mentioned they were going to a swap meet to divest themselves of still more possessions, I asked if I could join them. It would be an exercise in renunciation.
I set the melodica down with a bunch of other people’s stuff on a fold-up table in a dusty parking lot cooked by the Florida sun. I think I priced it at $25. Eventually someone haggled me down to $8. The money wasn’t important; what mattered was that I was letting go of another object I didn’t use. I was training myself to avoid attachments. I overrode the pang of guilt as I took the cash – my dear grandma had given the instrument to me – and told myself to grow up. When I told my grandma, she was hurt. “I bought that for you,” she said. “It was a gift.” She wasn’t trying to make me feel bad; she was expressing how she felt. I’ve been troubled by my superficial take on the melodica ever since.
As I thought about that experience over subsequent years, I came to see “things versus people” as a dichotomy that’s false and destructive. You can’t even have things without people; we’re interdependent. People make things, whether they do so on a factory production line or in a one-person workshop. Then other people put them to use. Beyond this, things are more than mute material; they express their makers’ dreams and values. This connection between maker and made object is most visible in artifacts crafted by individual makers to their own designs, or designs they’ve adapted significantly – think Megan Fitzpatrick’s Dutch toolchests, or Danielle Rose Byrd’s bowls. But even anonymous workers on the production line at Toyota or General Electric are expressing their dreams of a good life, albeit less directly, as they cut, weld or assemble parts to other peoples’ designs using tools and equipment they don’t own.
Material artifacts are also repositories of memory. They keep people and places alive. In my office I have a Victorian bamboo étagère, its shelves filled with antique ceramics. The stand and all of its contents – a Dutch urn resembling an antique from Greece; two sugar-and-cream sets from Japan; pitchers and vases from Germany, Romania, England – once stood in the entryway of my friend Peggy’s house, a converted timber-frame barn. She’d bought the barn in pieces and made it into a home filled with character and natural light. I always coveted the pottery collection (and kicked myself for doing so, because it was hers). After Peggy died, her daughter held a barn sale. I bought the shelf and the ceramics – not only because I loved them, but to keep those things together as the Peggy Shepherd Pottery Collection. Peggy lives on in these artifacts, as well as many others in our home: the curvy black metal chair she gave me at Christmas in 1998, the funky painted cabinet a former boyfriend of hers had cobbled together, the beautifully upholstered chair she gave me after I built cabinets for her barn-house kitchen. “You didn’t charge me enough,” she said. “I want you to have this.”
The World War II-era sofa in our living room, which I bought from Peggy many years ago, reminds me to be thankful that we’re not hiding in bomb shelters while subsisting on tinned meat, chicory “coffee” and other rations. The salvaged leaded-glass window I built into our bathroom wall carries forward the legacy of a client’s family home that was demolished as part of an airport expansion. The ceramic model of a terraced house on my office bookshelves reminds me of my first woodworking boss, Raymond, who gave it to me when Patrick and I were married, adding “You’ve always said you want a house of your own.”
When we buy things from those who make them, we not only support those craftspeople, we also do our part to keep craft traditions alive. In the factory-made Arts & Crafts-style cabinet I bought tenth-hand from a back room in a Bloomington grocery store in 1995 lies a silver cheese knife made by Hart Silversmiths in Chipping Campden, England, the lone surviving enterprise from Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft. Mixed in with blue-green ceramics bought at yard sales and junk shops is a vase bought for me by my former husband, Kent, and his wife, Mary, on a visit to the Van Briggle Pottery & Tile. There are small pieces by Ephraim Faience that I purchased at The Omni Grove Park Inn and a Granny Smith green cabinet vase I bought from Scott Draves of Door Pottery in 2015, when we were in neighboring booths at a show in Chicago.
Even mass-produced artifacts deserve more respect than we generally give them, at least in the States. We have a famously materialistic culture in which too few people have more than the most superficial, consumerist understanding of material objects. As Elaine Scarry pointed out in her 1985 book, “The Body in Pain,”
…anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this one small way, be well…. Whether they reach someone in the extreme conditions of imprisonment or in the benign and ordinary conditions of everyday life, the handkerchief, blanket, and bucket of white paint contain within them the wish for well-being: ‘Don’t cry; be warm; watch now, in a few minutes even these constricting walls will look more spacious.’1
Instead of “things versus people,” it would be more fitting to appreciate how things embody important characteristics of their makers, as well as memorialize others.
The things we live with also shape us in ways we often don’t even see. They impose their own demands on our behavior: We have to learn how to use the new email platform, drain the compressor, grease the sander’s gears, prime the pump. Many things, from the humble kitchen whisk to the thickness planer, bicycle or car, become extensions of our bodies, magnifying our abilities, for better or worse, and sometimes leading us to imagine ourselves more powerful than we are. (All it takes to prove the validity of this statement is a power outage.)
