Work in progress. Partially finished elevation of the north wall, showing the planned corner unit and set of narrow drawers to the left of the stove.
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.
Soapstone slabs at Quality Surfaces near Spencer, Indiana
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.
Comparing milk paint samples (which have a topcoat of the same water-white conversion varnish we’ll be using on the cabinets) to colors in the stone
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.
The unit holds four baskets — two on the left, and two on the right, with one above the other on each side. Here Tony is modeling the unit closed, with only the lower left basket in place.
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.
The first step: pull the primary pair of baskets forward. You have to pull them all the way out before attempting to move them over so that you can pull the secondary baskets out.
Fully open. The primary side [only one basket is installed on each side here] pulls over to the side of the cabinet opening, freeing it up so you can pull the secondary baskets forward.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.
A set of four capacious drawers on full-extension slides will take the place of the original corner optimizer and the 12″-wide drawers that would have flanked it.
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.
The Lost Art Press storefront will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, and I’ll give a free demonstration on scraping at 2 p.m. that day.
The lecture will cover:
Understanding scraping. How and why it works. And what that means for the sharpening procedure.
How to sharpen any scraper using a block of wood, your sharpening stones and a burnisher (no commercial jigs required).
How to grind scrapers to special shapes for mouldings, chair seats and general use.
How to set up and use scraper planes and the No. 80 cabinet scraper.
Note that this will absolutely, positively not be a shakedown/sales pitch for Crucible scrapers. In fact, I’m going to show you how to make your own curved card scraper so you don’t have to buy one. (Yes, we will have a few scrapers and burnishers on hand to sell. But that’s not why we’re doing this.)
We also will have our full line of Lost Art Press books for you to check out, including the gorgeous new one from Marc Adams, “The Difference Makers,” and David Finck’s “Making & Mastering Wood Planes.” We have a few lump hammers here in stock. I don’t think we have any blemished books, however.
My commute on Saturday to unlock the front door for the open day will be the easiest ever. We moved in upstairs, so I’ll just have to walk downstairs. Yesterday we opened up the door between the storefront and living spaces. The cats, while terrified, are curious. So you might also see a Lost Art Puss on Saturday.
Madeline reports she is almost out of the latest batch of stickers. They’re $7 for a set of three and are available from her etsy store (she ships worldwide).
Your sticker dollars go to supporting Madeline’s wack-doodle cat, named Chickpea, who insists on unraveling and eating articles of clothing (among other things). I think Madeline is purchasing a variety of calming fluids and cat treats to soothe the savage Pea….
This grouping of stickers is a fun batch. We have the “Rest for the Weary” sticker that features a silhouette of one of the chairs I copied from St Fagans National Museum of Wales. There’s a “#NeverSponsored” sticker that proclaims your independence from sponsorship – it felt great to paste that one over the brand names on my machines. And there’s our Chester Cornett sticker that features the sales slogan from his workshop’s sign. Translation: “We Make Anything or it Can’t Be Made.”
As we near the home stretch on our forthcoming book about kitchens, we thought it would be fun to publish a series of posts about a kitchen remodel on which I’m now working. You can read the first post here. Upcoming posts will discuss aesthetic dimensions, sources of hardware and other products, etc.
Stepping up together (by staying apart — Construction Man looks like he’d rather his friends stay at a proper distance) (Image: Library of Congress)
At the start of this kitchen project, the contractor, clients and I scheduled the work onsite for June, when Jenny and Ben would be in Austria in connection with Ben’s job. Then came covid-19. There may be no trip to Europe.
As veterans of many a kitchen remodel done with customers living in their home, Mark and I have ways of minimizing the pain. These include:
dust collection for power tools
dust barriers between the work area and the rest of the house (This includes covering HVAC vents to minimize the spread of dust through that system.)
floor mats (such as this one) that pick up dirt to keep it from being tracked out of the job area
clean up at the end of each day
a temporary kitchen set-up with a sink and counter (or table). We move the fridge into another room so it can keep storing food. A hotplate, crock pot and toaster oven will cook most meals. An outside grill will even make cooking fun.
We’re still set for June, though at this point all plans are subject to change if someone gets sick — or if the government imposes a directive to shelter in place. Even without such a directive, Mark and I have changed how we do business in the interest of minimizing contact with others.
Evidence of creativity from kids cooped up at home: Cats of all sorts hang from the ceiling.
As bars, restaurants and businesses with potential to disrupt supply lines have been shutting down en masse in response to the pandemic, it occurred to me that I should get as many of the materials as possible in hand without delay, in case my suppliers have to cease operations for several weeks. So yesterday, after confirming that Ben and Jenny were ready to go forward, I put together my primary materials orders and called them in — the solid wood and sheet goods order to Frank Miller Lumber, the hinges, drawer slides and blind corner storage unit to Richelieu Hardware, two of my most dependable suppliers for more than 15 years. At least this way I should be able to stay working and keep the job on track.
Existing cabinets: Should they stay or should they go?
In an ideal world, x-ray vision would enable us to see through cabinets, counters, walls and other solid materials to determine the location of ducts, electrical wires, gas and water lines and other things with potential to throw a wrench in the works. Locating such objects is especially important when you’re reworking the layout of a room; you need to assess whether your design can in fact be implemented. (While it’s true that anything can in principle be changed, the budget available for a job usually plays a big part in determining what “can” and “cannot” happen.)
To keep the household cooking without interruption for as long as possible, we’re leaving the existing kitchen intact for now. The basic layout of the cabinets will stay the same, so there’s no mystery about rerouting services. But there was one area I wanted to check before I start cutting parts for the new cabinets, the framed-up structure that housed the wall oven housing — just to make sure there was no surprise lurking inside. So yesterday Mark and I took out the wall oven (which no longer worked) and excavated a small portion of the wall to confirm there was nothing there beyond studs and plaster on metal lath. Before pulling the oven, Mark removed the appropriate fuse (yes, the house still has fuses, not breakers; installing a new panel will be part of the project) and covered the wires with wire nuts. After cleaning up the debris, he screwed a scrap of plywood over the over-sized hole to keep the resident kittens from potentially perilous exploration.
I hacked into the corner of the wall with the claw of a hammer to find out whether we’d be dealing with drywall or plaster. Meanwhile, aided by an invaluable headlamp, Mark used a multi-tool to cut a hole in the side of the oven housing for access to the wall. (Why not move the fridge out? you may wonder. The floor in front of it was packed with everyday stuff, and the table was covered in boxes of the cabinet’s former contents. It was easier to go through the cabinet side.)
The other structural detail we needed to check involved the staircase. Between the living room and the kitchen there’s a passageway about three-feet wide — plenty of space to move through easily, in theory. But in this case, the stairs to the basement loom like a chasm on one side. While the stairway poses no actual danger, it’s close enough to provoke a slight sense of risk — the kind of distinct yet largely subconscious discomfort that kitchen designer Johnny Grey has argued — convincingly — should be avoided.
Before. Picture yourself standing in the spot where I took this shot. Immediately to your left would be a gaping chasm — the stairway to the basement.
It’s not feasible to relocate the staircase as part of this project, but it occurred to me early on that it might be possible to shift the stairs forward by the width of one tread, and so add almost a foot to this narrow passage to make this traverse a bit more comfortable. Shifting the stairs would require raising the wall above the staircase base (see the image below) to gain the headroom code requires. This wall, however, is a major support for the roof, so I wanted Mark to take a good look at how it relates to its surroundings and determine whether he’d be able to modify it. (Before you think about modifying a wall of this sort it’s essential to consult someone who can assess the structural ramifications. I often refer clients to a structural engineer, but in this case, Mark has the insight required.) He gave the green light (which has nothing to do with the green circle of the mobile that hangs above).
Mark checks headroom to confirm that he can rework the staircase, thereby widening the floor at the entry to the kitchen by about 10″.
I’m waiting for the lumber delivery as I write this post. Next up: Building the cabinets.
Caleb Rogers lives in a spot that, while enviable at any time, seems especially so in the midst of a pandemic: a cabin of around 500 square feet, close to California’s Joshua Tree National Park. From his desert home he can see just three houses within a space of many miles, and of those three, two are abandoned.
He mentions his surroundings by way of illustrating why, beyond what he calls his addiction to the news, the pandemic has not affected him much. He sees his cat and does his work. Once or twice a week he drives to town to buy food, puts on a mask to go into the store and goes home. Once or twice a month, when making deliveries, he gets a glimpse of how the pandemic is affecting other people. He drives to Los Angeles to deliver a piece and sees the lines at the supermarket, “a line of 40 people waiting to get into Trader Joe’s, wearing their masks, and everyone’s on edge. We just don’t have that here [in Joshua Tree]. We have the wind. That’s the movement we have here. I feel like a tourist when I go into the city and have a peek at the way people are living. And all the shops that are closing! Rodeo Drive! I was in awe of all the boarded-up shop fronts. The city is really taking a hit. People seem to be so divided. Thank goodness I’m still working, I still have jobs. I’m really grateful.”
Born in 1974 on a small horse ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico, Caleb grew up moving around a lot. His parents separated when he was 4. Because his mother, a writer, has always been “a bit of a gypsy,” Caleb and his sister often found themselves in a new school.
Sometimes they moved far afield. “What I remember about growing up,” he reflects, “was living in England. That was the first time I felt settled, the first time I recall seeing my mother happy where she was.” His mother had taken the family there for a holiday, then stayed four years, from the time Caleb was 10 to age 14. It was the longest time he’d spent living in a single place.
Caleb (right) with his sister and mother, probably at his grandmother’s country house in Chappaqua, New York, circa 1980.
His mother’s love of travel rubbed off on him, and his own love of travel has had a deep influence on his work. By the time Caleb took up woodworking in his early 30s, he’d left junior college and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, moved to Guadalajara and hitchhiked to Guatemala. There he met a young woman from England. Smitten, he followed her back to London and eventually on to the cathedral city of Winchester.
As a practicing Buddhist, Caleb’s girlfriend had a butsudan, or Buddhist altar, in their home. Butsudans come in a variety of forms, from simple raised platforms to elaborately decorated cabinets. Despite its significance to its owner, the cheaply made object puzzled Caleb, who “thought it needed to be replaced….”
“It was more of a personal aesthetic,” he says – an aesthetic informed by the conviction that a piece’s form should express the values or ideals it represents. Inside the altar is a scroll that symbolizes the soul; it’s a focal point for meditation. “But her butsudan was particleboard veneered with walnut!” he explains. “Sweetheart,” he told her, “I get the practice, but please let me build you something better.”
Butsudan in poplar with asanoha (hemp leaf) motif.
“I see it everywhere,” he continues, referring to how cheaply most things today are made. “Part of my drive, to this day, is to strike that balance, to remind people of the importance of living with something that’s beautiful, that’s handmade. That really does drive me to get here to work every morning. I find that the quality of one’s life goes up, the fewer things one has and the more personal those things are. Most people have a lot of stuff; that takes up a lot of space. For myself, I find living with a few things that have been made by hand enriches my life. It makes life easier in so many ways. I don’t seem to need as much, to go out and buy something new. I get so much satisfaction from the things that I do have.”
Inner and outer doors of a tall butsudan in poplar and western red cedar.
But back to that first butsudan. Caleb knew nothing about woodworking when he decided to build it. He simply thought he could make something better. At the time, he was working in a pub; one of his customers was a woodworker. “He saw my doodles for the altar,” Caleb says, “and showed up the next day with a box of hand tools, everything I needed to get going in our spare bedroom. I picked up a pallet – there were always pallets at the back of the pub – and in a few days I was able to finish the butsudan that I had drawn up.” He calls that first piece “relatively crude” but is glad to know it’s still in use.
After Caleb and his girlfriend broke up, he traveled some more. He taught English, music and art in China and wandered through Morocco, France and Spain. In 2012 he got married and moved to Peru with his wife, then back to China for another couple of years. “No matter where I was, however, I was always thinking about building my butsudans. Something about it seemed urgent to me.” So in 2014 Caleb and his wife returned to the United States and he decided to try making a living as a woodworker, specializing in butsudans. “It took a while before I got my first order,” he says, “but fortunately I’ve been working consistently ever since.”
He moved to Joshua Tree in 2017, when he and his wife separated. It was a way “to rehabilitate myself. [Being] somewhere where other people were not” made it a good place “to get my head straight.” He immersed himself in work. His shop is a rented garage about 20 minutes away from his home, also in the desert. The shop has no air conditioning. “It is hot,” he allows. “But I get very focused when I work, and whether it’s hot or cold, it all seems to blur together.”
Business, Wood, Joinery & Tools
Some commissions come through his website. Before the pandemic, he was doing a lot of work for clients in Europe. Now he works for clients in Los Angeles and closer to home, with most jobs coming by word of mouth. A few clients have become patrons, furnishing their homes with his work. Friends see it and place their own orders.
Tansu in pine and alder with chrysanthemum motif.
Every commission starts with a conversation, followed by numerous emails, and sometimes phone calls. He likes to see photos of the clients’ home, to get a feel for the space and their tastes; that helps with deciding on scale, lumber species and finishes. “My favorite commissions are the ones where my client feels they have a genuine problem which they want to solve,” he says. “I love the idea of organizing space, getting something tidied up.”
When first starting out, he worked in domestic woods. Poplar was readily available; for a while he used it almost exclusively, occasionally substituting alder. Recently he has been using oak and sapele, among other species. When teaching classes he uses pine. “I love the knots, the squirrelly nature of it, the smell.”
Freestanding partition with bending kumiko in poplar, alder and washi.
A distinguishing feature of Caleb’s work is the absence of nails and screws. “I like the challenge of designing things knowing that all the connections have to be in wood,” he says. When he does use hardware, as he did for a recent shoe cabinet, he prefers it to be traditional Japanese stuff. (One source is Hida Tool of Berkeley.) And all of his pieces are knockdown, built with traditional joinery, which he finds endlessly rewarding. “You take the classic mortise and tenon,” he suggests by way of example. “There are so many variations. One joint I use a lot is the dovetail that’s locked into place with either a through-tenon or a blind tenon. It’s very easy to put together, very easy to take apart. It seems to be very strong.” Furniture that can be broken down to flat parts has helped him get commissions from clients beyond Southern California. “At first [clients are] daunted, but some email me saying ‘That was so enjoyable!’”
An example of how Caleb uses a tenoned member with a wide shoulder to lock a sliding dovetail in place for a knockdown piece. Once the tenon is fully home, its rail tied into a larger puzzle of interconnected parts, it prevents the dovetail from being pulled out.
Detail of kumiko.
Caleb is self-taught. Returning to the woodworker who was his customer at the pub in England, he says, “We never built anything together. He just gave me some tools and magazines. Everything I’ve learned is something I’ve figured out – looking at furniture and wondering how it’s put together, how it could work. The tansu, for me, was always such a source of mystery: ‘How do you get a corner to go together like that?’ My love of joinery is a love of problem solving. I like joinery to be hidden as much as possible, a mystery, so you don’t see how the cabinet’s put together. It’s a personal thing. I tend to revisit the same joints over and over, to build the same forms, mostly Japanese-style tansus and butsudans.”
Tall entryway cabinet in alder and birch.
Caleb still has the three Sheffield steel chisels he started out with, gifts from that customer at the pub. He has added a few power tools, such as a contractor-grade table saw for ripping; as a custom woodworker who lives primarily on commissions, he has to respect the time constraints imposed by sometimes-modest budgets. Select power tools help him find the balance between a client’s budget and the time he can afford to invest. Even so, he estimates about 80 percent of his work is done by hand, with Japanese handplanes (known as kannas), Japanese chisels and Japanese saws. “I love being able to cut on the pull stroke. All Japanese tools are designed to be used on the pull stroke, drawing the work in toward yourself, using your body as a clamp or a stop. It feels more intimate somehow,” he says. He appreciates the mobility granted by reliance on so few tools and attributes this preference for minimalism to his childhood – “a few tools in a box, get to a new place, unpack and get to work.”
In addition to commissioned work, Caleb teaches classes at his cabin. In his tansu-building class, students work outdoors, exclusively with hand tools, to build a complete cabinet in one week. “The idea behind it was to get people involved in woodworking,” he says. “People who have an interest in it but felt ‘I don’t have the space for it, I don’t have the tools.’” The class is designed to show them how much they can do with an improvised workshop, outdoors. Most students rent an Airbnb in Joshua Tree.
“One thing I enjoy about doing the classes when we’re outdoors and only using hand tools is moving with the rhythms of the day and the weather, and being quiet,” he says. “The name of my business is Esho Funi Butsudans. It’s the idea of the oneness of self and environment, of how inseparable the two are. When you’re working with your hands and building a piece of furniture, that line disappears. This thing I’m making is very much me. In building it, working with the wood, considering where the knots are, and how the wood may behave five years from now, it bleeds over into me. The two things are just the same. When the piece is finished, it has its own personality, its own character. To me that is…I can’t think of anything, short of having children. Sharing myself. Growing. It’s a therapeutic thing to do, to build something with your hands and return to it every day.”
Lighting
One of my favorite Caleb Rogers creations is not cabinet or an altar, but a light fixture. Floating in the dark, its undulating organic form calling a jellyfish to mind, it’s a delicate confection in tissue-covered reed.
“I’ve always loved lighting, playing around with light. My mother designed sets for the theater for a time. She was brilliant at creating a mood using light.” He describes the process of making these lights: “I start bending the reeds and hot gluing [them] here and there. And then I’ll take tissue paper and white glue and cover the whole thing with tissue paper and put a light in it, and gradually layer that tissue paper until the quality of that light coming through is just right.”
One light he made for a client in Los Angeles was so large that he had to cut it in half to get it in his Nissan Sentra for delivery. To get a feel for the space and the kind of light he wanted to design, he’d spent a night on the sofa at his client’s house, staring up at the space in the ceiling where the client had said he wanted the lamp to be. It took Caleb six hours to stitch the light back together so that it looked just right.
He tries to work quickly and prolifically, to keep his work affordable and the commissions coming in. “Before I start a piece, I build it in my head, maybe 100 times, before I pick up a tool, so that when I do start on a project, I know what I’m doing. I don’t take breaks; I don’t eat lunch.”
Asked how he prices his work, Caleb responds with a reflective question: “How do you price something? What are you willing to sacrifice in your life so you can do this [kind of work]? I keep my bills as low as possible. I don’t have any debt, I don’t have credit cards. I want to be able to do my work and keep my prices reasonable. I try not to think about what, on an hourly basis, I’m making. At first I was making butsudans for whatever someone could pay, just so I could keep working and put the photos on my website.” That generated more work. “I’ve been able to do this as my sole source of income for going on five years. So I’m very fortunate. I don’t have fixed prices. It has a lot to do with the client, what they can afford. I want to build the thing I have in my head and I don’t want to compromise just because I might have to work a little harder or a little longer for a little less money.”
He’s grateful to have a few clients he considers patrons, who commission dozens of pieces for their homes. “For somebody like me, it makes all the difference in the world. If you have money out there, there’s really nothing better you can do than supporting an artist you like.”
