We’ve got more progress to report from the front lines of the Camp Davis renovation project. This time it’s cabinetry. And an island – a huge one. After a few weeks of using the courtyard as a refrigerator, cooking everything in the microwave or on an electric griddle and washing dishes in the bathroom sink, the kitchen is on the brink to being functional once again. And also badass.
That’s all thanks to this guy, of course:
My card-carrying Lumberjock extraordinaire father-in-law.
I mentioned his skills in another post a while back, but he’s completely outdone himself this time.
It’s not that he helped us install cabinets and an island – which would be huge in itself. It’s more that he custom built the whole thing from scratch and then drove it out to West Virginia where he quickly assembled it like he was flown in from Ikea headquarters in Smirgden.
He shows up with a truck-full of carefully labeled, perfectly crafted cabinet pieces, then unloads a few tools and gets to work.
You hear the drill buzzing here and there, items are shuffled about.
A few minutes later and it starts making sense. What was a stack of wood begins to resemble kitchen cabinetry.
Not much long after that you have to scrape your jaw off the floor.
The stove will live in that little gap between the two smaller cabinets on the right. With cooking being the main focus of our time at Camp, we figured why not make it the center of our kitchen, opposite a bar for our guests to congregate?
The cabinets are maple, the joints are bridled, the countertops Ikea butcher block, and the door fronts and cabinet backing are beadboard.
Yes. Inside the cabinets, where you might never look, is beadboard. Because of course they are.
I feel like I’m a relatively handy guy. I can make things. I can fix stuff. I can do for self. But then I get to work with my father-in-law and realize that in the world of carpentry he counts by 1/32′s of an inch, and I carry nothing but a sledgehammer.
The beadboard matters for the same reasons I try to teach my son not to tuck his shirt into his underwear: life is all about the details. And yes, this is normally something I would rush through or gloss over, but everytime I happen to look inside those cabinets I’m going to smile and then laugh at myself and how far I have to go to get from Lumberjoke to Lumberjock.
There is more left to assemble (some beadboard on the sides of the cabinets, veneer covers for the toe-kicks, cabinet door pulls, some varnish on the countertops), but we were just too excited not to share the almost completed version.
With this huge step all-but finished, we can now properly install the sink, dishwasher and range. The refrigerator arrived today as well, so we can move our food back inside once again. The kitchen will soon be fully functional, and kind of unbelieveable.
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