How to manage compost

The work, the love, the art that goes into making soil from waste (composting) is a critical part of how that system out there (Nature...) created the fertile world around us. Understanding that system and putting ourselves into it we began to create our own fertility and it changed the way people practiced agriculture.

I grew up using a compost pile in the back yard for our food waste, and often had the job of going out to dump the pail on the pile behind the barn and layering on a bit of dry stuff: leaves, hay, and some animal manure if you had some. These piles would heat up as the microbes burned through life cycles and changed  that pile of kitchen scraps into that fluffy black gold that then fed the next years gardens, and yes made more kitchen scraps.

Forum: alt-Kitchen pictures

This is a place for readers (and us) to post pictures of kitchens that are a little different, working kitchens, farm kitchens, inexpensive kitchens, non-standard kitchens, indoor/outdoor kitchens, any kitchen that has something to say to us, kitchens for foodies that you have built.

Sam's favorite kitchen books and magazines

There is a vast literature on kitchen design, both books and magazines. But not much of it is useful, and a lot of it is thinly disguised advertising. Here are some great books on the subject that discuss fundamental ideas you can use. Some of these are a little hard to find.

Fundamental Concepts:

Management in the Home, by Lillian Gilbreth. The Gilbreths more or less invented what we now call ergonomics, and Lillian's book on the home is probably still the most powerful book on the subject in that it goes into the underlying concepts and ways of thinking that can empower you do design a really functional kitchen. “Storage at Point of First Use!”

The Cornell Kitchen, Glenn Beyers et al. This is the research report from the early 50's. Most modern kitchen design is base on this research. I don't really know how easy it is to find a copy of this. Dodd Mead was the original publisher.

Small Kitchens, by Robin Murell. This would be another book to find used on the web, but is the best book on small kitchen design, and the only book I can think of which has something original to say about the basic organization of the kitchen.

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, et al. This is expensive, but your library has it. I don't think anyone should undertake a major house project, or a kitchen project, without reading this. It's about the features, the “patterns” that make a design come alive.

The Motion-Minded Kitchen, by Sam Clark, Houghton Mifflin, 1985. This is another used book purchase. When I was writing this, I spent a lot of time in the Boston Public Library, researching the history of kitchen design. That's where I first learned about The Cornell Kitchen and the Gilbreths. These writers opened the door for me on fundamental ideas that apply not only to the kitchen but to any design project that involves work methods, ergonomics, accessibilty, storage, or efficient use of space. My own work is still inspired by these sources. I mention my own book because it discusses all this material in some detail. I think you could get a feel for “storage at point of first use” and “one-motion storage”, the work center concept, and other basics there. Our website has a section on this and my other books.

The Kitchen Book, by Terence Conran. This British book from the 70's is great. When I first read it, I was put off by how expensive some of the kitchens seemed. But in fact it has a lot of ideas that would be useful on any budget, and a lot of the basic design information is very useful, more advanced than what you'd get in most kitchen books.

A lot of kitchen books and magazines are pitching a very consistent look. What I like about Conran, Dwell, and “Small Kitchens” is that they show that not all kitchens have to look the same, and there are many possible solutions to the design problems that come up.

Current Books and Magazines:

I like Sarah Susanka's books about small house design. I think Taunton Press's Kitchen Idea Book is very useful, because it shows a great variety of very well design kitchens in different materials.

I don't like any current kitchen magazines, and I could go on a long time on why I feel that way. But I do like Dwell Magazine, for a bracing, annual dose of Modernism.

Link to our Website

Young Man in Search of a Dish Drainer

In 1967, I bought 20 acres of land on a muddy back road in Plainfield Vermont for $1,000, and built a little house on it with my first wife, Peggy Clark. The house was 16 feet by 20, plus a little sleeping loft, and somehow we managed to get a sitting area, dining table, and a bit of a kitchen into that space. We had running water, but no electricity at first.

Peggy had the idea of building a set of slotted shelves above the sink for all our dishes. The idea was you would wash and rinse the dishes, then put them away wet on the dishrack, and the little bit of remaining water would drip down into the sink. The dishes would be stored there, too. For some reason, we started calling this contraption a “wonder no-dry”.

It made dishwashing easy. It eliminated maybe a third of the work by cutting out the “drying the dishes” part. Then it eliminated maybe another third by cutting out the “putting dishes away” part. Because the wonder no-dry was right at the sink, it also saved a lot of walking about during cleanup.

It was space-saving, too , important in a tiny house. In most kitchens, you have the place where you drain dishes, the place you store them, and usually also a dishwasher, really three stations for the same dishes. We had just one.

Since then, I have built a great number of dishdrainers, in my own dwellings, in various communal houses, but mostly for customers of the various woodworking businesses I've been involved in. Some of these folks also had dishwashers, and some didn't.

I love the idea that Peggy thought this idea up, but in fact I've since seen similar contraptions in pictures of Scaninavian homes, in various youth hostels, and once in a Medieval castle in Wales.

The wonder no-dry is a great little metaphor for how I like to think about design.

A lot of design in general and kitchen design in particular is about show, style, fashion, and marketing. Bigger, more complicated, and more expensive is better. If a person an do something, a machine can probably do it better.

The dishdrainer goes the opposite way, toward simplification and economy, understanding various work processes, and designing the kitchen to make them easier and simpler.

I like designing this way. For a designer, it's more interesting to think about function, about how particular people want do do things, than it is to think about “products” and “features”. If we're on the beam, sometimes we get a more interesting and maybe even beautiful result than if we had take a more conventional approach.

Dish drainer defined: slotted shelves that drain back into the sink

Metabox: The no-drawer drawer

Another product that gives a custom result at less cost is the Metabox Drawer System, made by Blum, one of the largest German manufacturers of cabinet gear.

Usually when you make a drawer, you build a wooden box, the drawer box, often with dovetail corners. Then you finish it. Then you mount costly hardware on it, and attach a finish front on it in the wood of choice. Very nice, classic, elegant. But there are so many steps in the manufacturing process; its intrinsically expensive.

The usual kitchen design solution to this conundrum is to minimize the number of drawers, and put in a lot of door-front cabinets. The problem with this is, door cabinets hold about half what a bank of drawers can, and what's in there is tough to extract.

With Metabox, the hardware is the drawer sides and the drawer structure. You don't build a box at all. You mount half the hardware on the cabinet, the other half to a 3/4” plywood drawer bottom (which you have already varnished), then the drawer is literally ready to hang in the cabinet. Then you attach the drawer back, and the finish drawer front, with cute little adjustable clips.

If you built a metabox drawer, with a plywood or maybe Valchromat front, you would have a full extension drawer with all the practical virtues of a conventional drawer, but at a much lower cost.

Wire Baskets and Drawers

One of the key ideas of good kitchen design, going back to the early days of kitchen research can be summed up in one word: drawers.

Drawer cabinets in base cabinets hold much more than door cabinets, and it's much easier to find and retrieve what you need without strain. But drawer cabinets do cost more than door cabinets to buy or build.

We use a lot of wire baskets. The picture shows a stack of Elfa baskets installed in a run of cabinets. We get them from The Container Store, which has a great online utility for pickout out what you need (Elfa Drawer Planner). The frames come in various heights and widths, and have a slide on a four inch interval. You can then insert 4”, 8”, or 12” baskets as needed. It takes just a minute or two to put the whole thing together.

What you get is a set of interesting drawers for about $150. They can be used to store most anything, but we use them a lot for produce that can benefit from a little air flow.

Valchromat, what is that?

Ann Smith's Valchromat sink counter

Most of our projects have undermount sinks. They look great in an old timey way, and function much better than the usual “drop-in” sinks that have that ledge around the edge. It's much easier to cleanup around the sink, you can just sweep stuff from the counter into the sink. It also works much better for draining dishes, you don't get those puddles on the counter. Not to mention how nice the undermount style looks.

We usually use stone for these counters, but are always looking for less costly alternatives. Not everybody can afford slate, soapstone, or granite.

What's the alternative? An undermount sink in a wood counter is asking for trouble. Tile eventually fails. Laminates don't work because the edge of the plywood is exposed.

One of our clients, Ann Smith, asked us to do her sink counter with Valchromat. Valchro what?

We had never heard of it. It turns out to be a European, fairly green, “medium density fibreboard”. Though it can swell, it doesn't break down when wet. It comes in a lot of wonderful colors, and the colors go all the way through. It comes in 49 X 98 sheets, 3/4” thick (slate colored one 1” thickness). It costs about $200 per sheet For a waterproof counter, that is very inexpensive.

Valchromat is incredibly easy to sand, saw, or route using ordinary woodworking tools. At Ann's, we made a plywood template for the sink cutout, followed it with a ordinary router bit, and sanded it. This stuff is flat, stable, doesn't chip out, really nice to work with.

I love the colors. We've put every sort of finish on it, including oil based poly and various oil finishes. With certain oil finishes, or an “oil wax” it looks very beautiful, sort of leathery. It's not impervious like stainless steel or maybe granite. Like wood or soapstone, it does best if given a new coat of oil when it looks dried out or uneven. This is a “patina material” not a “stays new looking forever” material. Ian is still experimenting with different finishes to find the best choices.

It's a revelation making a set of drawer fronts, or a cabinet door, out of Valchromat. If we're making, say, a bank of ash or pine drawers, we have to get the wood, plane it, glue up a panel, cut out the drawer fronts, then sand and finish. Fun, but a major task. With Valchromat, you cut out a piece the size of the cabinet front, slice it up as needed, and that's it. Ready to finish and install.

This new material brings us a little closer to an important goal: finding a way to build a custom kitchen that is not too expensive, but has the same attention to detail and functionality that we can get with more traditional materials.

There are at least two other products that we particularly like for similar reasons. I'll do separate posts on those.

Often it's not cabinetry that runs up the cost, but other factors. I'll do a post on “cost drivers” soon.