Affordable counter ideas

When I first started thinking of this post, my mind was flooded with the endless number of puns available to the person writing about counters. Counter intelligence, counter insurgency, cabinet –n- counter (actually the name of a business here in central Vermont) Anyway, you can see that the temptations are hard to resist. That being the case I will continue with restraint.

When people first started putting together surfaces to prepare their meals on, they turned to the obvious things around, stone and wood. As you know the more things change….   Anyway, as I am sure you appreciate these materials are most certainly back in fashion. I can recall only one kitchen that I have built that does not have one or both of these materials.

Natural materials, with natural oil finishes make beautiful kitchen surfaces. They wear nicely and are endlessly renewable with a little elbow grease; they have a timeless quality that stands up to the whims of trends (except maybe granite). The only real draw back to these materials is price.

I am planning a kitchen right now with soapstone and maple butcher block where the counters could represent 25% of the total job.

As much as I love sound, heavy, natural materials that ooze warmth, a very simple,  furniture grade plywood with a wood edge and a poly urethane or oil finish can be functional, beautiful, inexpensive and last for 20 years with little maintenance.

This is a picture of a counter made from cherry plywood with a wood edge. It was finished with a wipe on polyurethane. It has held up for almost eight years now and with a little touch up will go another 10 years.

People often in planning a kitchen encounter expensive and maybe trendy materials and appliances. It is hard to sort through all the glossy magazines and your friends and neighbors tips and ideas. Folks become overwhelmed by the costs and scale the project grows into. Then they either don’t do it, or sink themselves into bigger debt.

With a little scavenging and affordable material choices,  you can have all the benefits as it relates to function of a high end kitchen for half  the price. And maybe something different, maybe a unique style will come out of it, a style that runs “counter” to  popular trends.

Kitchen Design Tutorial: Don't Put away the dishes, Pre-position them

Never put anything away

Kitchen design, I mean really good, functional kitchen design, is really based on a few pretty simple ideas, many of which come to us from the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

Perhaps the fundamental idea is storage at point of first use. Store the thing where you will be standing when you first need that thing. Give the best storage to the things you use the most. Store by use, not category. If you are designing your kitchen, let this be your mantra: storage at point of first use.

The Gilbreths devised a variety of tools for assessing work processes. One of these was a sort of alphabet of motions known as the therbligs (see below). Using these names, you could describe or enumerate any work activity. One of my favorite therbligs is Pre-Position.

Gary Cooper's six shooter, or my carpenter's hammer, are great examples of things that are pre-positioned. They are located right where they will be used and pre-positioned so that Gary or I can grasp them using the same hand position needed in use.

In the kitchen, my favorite example is a knife slot. At your prep area, your favorite knives are stored in a simple slot at the back of the counter, where you can grasp the one you want in an instant, with the grip you will use for chopping or slicing.

My idea for today is that as you design your kitchen, don't think in terms of storing things, or stowing them away. Think of pre-positioning them for their next outing. Dry the knife quickly, and slide it into its slot. Locate the oatmeal pot, and the measuring cup, near the sink, where you can measure out a cup of water, and dump it in the pot, and grab the salt on the way to the stove, etc.

Were you to keep your knives in a drawer, you would use up a lot of therbligs putting your favorite knive to work. You'd have to move your hand to the drawer (transport empty) open the drawer (transport again perhaps), find the knife (search), pick it up (grasp), move your arm to the counter (transport loaded), maybe adjust your grasp (grasp), and so on.

The idea of pre-positioning rather than storing things works best for the things you need the most: certain spices; your favorite pots, salt and pepper, maybe the coffee or tea. The oil. If you can preposition, rather than store, the twenty things you use the most, you have made your kitchen work much easier, and I think, more graceful and fun.

My all time favorite prepositioning device is the wall mounted dishdrainer we call a “wonder-no-dry”. Usually, washing dishes, you wash the dish, rinse it, dry it, or let it dry on your rack, then a bit later you come back and put it away in a cupboard. If you have a dishwasher, you may (or may not) prerinse the dishes, stick them in the dishwasher, come back later, unload the dishwasher, put the stuff in cupboards, then get it out later.

With the dishdrainer, you wash the dish, rinse it, and stick it up in the wooden dishdrainer where it dries itself, the few drips finding their way back into the sink. The dish is now prepositioned, easy to see, ready to grab when wanted, in short, pre-positioned. No unloading, no storing, no searching. The drying process, the loading and unloading of the dishwasher steps are eliminated.

When you approach storage this way, you are saving work, but also space. In the case of dish management, conventionally you have two locations devoted to storing the same dishes; the cabinet, and the dishwasher itself. With the drainer, you have just one, opening up your kitchen layout to othe possibilities while saving the cost of the dishwasher.

I'm not pitching exactly these solutions; if you want a dishwasher – most of our customers do – fine. If you want to store the knives in the drawer, that's OK. It's more the idea of thinking in terms of work processes, and shortening them, up, and making them not just more efficient but more pleasant. There's an old labor song, “Don't Mourn, Organize”. My point here: “Don't Store, Preposition”.

The Therbligs:

1:   Search

2:   Select
3:   Transport empty (i.e., move your hand toward an object you
      need)
4:   Grasp
5:   Transport loaded (move something by dragging, carrying, etc)
6:   Hold
7:   Release Hold
8:   Position
9:   Pre-position for later use
10:  Inspect
11:  Assemble
12:  Disassemble
13:  Use
14:  Unavoidable Delay
15:  Avoidable Delay
16:  Plan
17:  Rest to overcome fatigue

The motion minded kitchen

Drawing of a mix center from Lillian Gilbreth's
Management in the Home

When I tell people I build kitchen cabinets they often ask me what style cabinets I build. They are thinking Colonial, Shaker, Mission, modern European. I am never quite sure how to respond because our emphasis is not so much on style as it is on functionality, ergonomics, and generally creating a space that is a joy to work in.

Sam Clark’s first book was called The Motion Minded Kitchen. The name comes from what is known as Motion Studies. At the turn of the century as the Industrial Revolution was chugging along, a lot of people were thinking about ways to make labor easier and more efficient. Two such people were Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank was a bricklayer by trade and an early student, and maybe the originator, of motion studies. Through research and work in his trade he came up with systems and tools that allowed a worker to be twice as efficient and with less effort. Though the tools were important to him, his emphasis was in organizing work spaces and sites; setting up work sequences and ideas such as point of first use (setting up your tool or kitchen knife right where you use it) and pre-positioning of tools (or the coffee and grinder).

Lillian was also a student and progenitor of motion studies and took her ideas into household management and most importantly to us, the kitchen. Her book Management in the Home laid out those ideas of work centers and point of first use as it applied in the kitchen. She also identified early the changes of the kitchen back into a social and family space, and laid out many of the concepts that underpin modern kitchen design.

These ideas create the basis of how we design a kitchen, and give us the tools and the process we go through with a customer. Instead of starting a design process with wood and counter decisions, wall color and type of sink, start with the work center. That best spot in the kitchen for working in. Where all of your favorite utensils are and most used spices and oils, one motion away. Ideally it is situated somewhere between the sink and stove with just enough space to spread out but not too much; some nice natural light, and just enough connection to the social part of the kitchen. Now, what kind of counter would work best for you in that spot? Would you want doors or drawers underneath?  How deep are those drawers? How about a place for food scraps and trash maybe.  Then go out from that spot, maybe a spot for a second chef, storage for things that you don’t reach for everyday.