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.

That cabinet under the sink!

Everyone is familiar with that lost space under the sink. The pipes and inherent disorder of a cabinet with often no shelving. I am not a big fan of base cabinets with doors because drawers are so much more efficient for storage. Who likes rummaging through a 24" deep cabinet on your knees.

However in the case of the sink cabinet there are not many options because of all the utilities associated with water in and water out. There are however some ways to minimize the loss of storage.

1. Build your sink cabinet just as big as it needs to be. The inside dimension of the cabinet should be just 1/2" smaller then the largest outside diameter of the sink itself. This is often smaller then the manufacturer recommends, sometimes by as much as 2-3". We have found this to work fine and those few precious inches can be given to the cabinets on either side.
  
2. Find a sink with the drain to the back of the sink instead of in the center. This allows for much tidier installation of sink utilities. A good plumber can set those pipes and drains way to the back of the cabinet, making the front into better storage. Sometimes there is even enough room to put a shallow shelf in front of the pipes.

3. Finally, if you like single a bowl, there are some wonderful sinks out there that are only 24" wide! You can get away with a single door in these set ups! The best ones are called "D sinks" because of their shape. They are deeper in the back, so much so that the faucet has to be placed on the side. Because of this they have all the capacity of a wider, but shallower style.

Just a few tricks for keeping that black hole behind those doors a little bit friendlier, and not letting that greedy sink cabinet hog up to much of our precious kitchen storage.
  

Some thoughts on sinks...

So many choices...

   I grew up in Northern Ohio around the Amish communities. The most strict, known as Old Order, do not even allow indoor plumbing. I remember as a kid being impressed with how they lived and sometimes imagined living a simple life with little or no electricity, but water in and water out seemed a modest convenience even then.

  Everybody stands at the kitchen sink in our house for some part of everyday. Between The prep, the clean up, the drink of water, washing hands, a lot happens there. It would be hard to imagine my kitchen without a wonderful deep basin, conveniently located with clean water flowing that doesn’t freeze in the winter. Call me spoiled!

too many!

   My wife and I have been looking into buying a new sink and as with everything else in this post scarcity world the options are dizzying. The oldest sinks were large relatively shallow basins that were stand alone on legs or a low table, the oldest often made out of stone. Now, well, a little Google search can send you reeling.

    Our searching got us looking at what are called farmhouse sinks. These are basically a tub sitting on a lower cabinet like a utility sink. These set ups have a lot of wonderful advantages. With the edge right in front of you and not dropped into a counter a couple inches back from the edge of the counter your work is right there in front of you. This also, obviously, widens the space behind the sink, making this area much less crowded then it tends to be with the all the flotsam associated with the back of the sink.

   These sinks also just have a wonderful old timey, utilitarian feel to them. They are of course available in just about any material, and it has seemed to me that the prices have come down and seem more readily available. I just found a soapstone sink locally made for under $600. I think you could get one any style or material and not pay more then that. This is still a lot knowing we get wonderful stainless steel sinks for under $150, but it could be worth the splurge.

    So happy sink searching, and I tell you what we settle on.    

It doesn't have to be big, just smart

People sometimes think that a good kitchen design means restaurant style stoves, huge refrigerators, or granite counters.

But there is a much more important feature which every well designed kitchen has to have. That is a food prep area, 30” to 48” wide, that is but a step or two away from the sink, and but a step or two at most to the cooktop. The spatial relationship is essential.

This work area will have a counter at the right height, and usually a set of drawers below, where the most-used gear is stored. Often above this counter will be convenient storage for the most-used ingredients: salt, pepper, oil, and so on.

If your kitchen has this, it can be a pleasure to work in, large or small. If not, no granite tops or restaurant style stoves will make it an efficient workplace. When I design kitchens, I start here.

I see a lot of kitchens, including new, expensive ones, that don't have this. Often the stove and sink are jammed close together, and the work counters are somewhere else, out in the wings of the layout. Sometimes this happens because people believe that the stove has to be on the outside wall (to have a hood), and that the sink has to be under a window. Neither of these things are true. I say, get the layout right, move a window if that's called for, and get the new stove, or new floor, later.

If you have this well organized food prep area, you have a pretty good kitchen. If you have a second prep area (also handy to the stove) and a “well organized cleanup-and-dish-storage center” at the sink, you are on your way to a great kitchen, that will be a pleasure to work in.

The Origin Story: How SCD Started

I've been a builder since about 1970, mostly working in small partnerships and coop building outfits located in Cambridge, Mass, and in Central Vermont. We always had as shop of some sort, and always did quite a bit of kitchen work.

In the early 80's, I wrote a kitchen book called “The Motion-Minded Kitchen”. I spent a lot of time in the Boston Public Library researching the history of the kitchen. My favorite discovery was the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. In the 1920s they developed something called Motion Study, which was a very powerful way of looking at any kind of work setting. After his death, Lillian applied these ideas to the home, and specifically to kitchen design and the work we do in our kitchens.

Most of the basic ideas of kitchen design concepts we use today go back to Motion Study, including the fundamental ideas of work centers, food flow, “storage at point of first use”, and “one-motion storage”. In the early '50s, a huge research project at Cornell, known as the Cornell Kitchen Study, took this work further. These ur-texts are the basis of good kitchen design, and also of ergonomic design and accessible design.

When I was about 60, I was ready to stop being a working carpenter and General Contractor. I wasn't that good up on the ladder any more, and there were younger people who were much stronger. Also, being a GC is very stressful. I think the term 24/7 was originally a term to describe the GC's workday.

I decided it might be interesting to build a new business from scratch, a small shop building kitchens based on what I had learned over the years, including all the concepts I learned back in the Boston Public Library.

It would be fun to use these ideas in the design of kitchens, but I'd been doing that already. What was really exciting was the idea of applying the same concepts to the design and operation of the shop itself. It's always great fun to set up a shop, and I've done it many times. But it might be really thrilling to design a shop from scratch, exactly laid out and equipped for this one primary purpose. And so it proved to be.

A kitchen functions a lot like a woodshop. In one case, say, you are taking a one-pound slab of salmon from the fridge, cutting it to size, spicing it up, making a drizzle for it, cooking it just so, placing it artfully on a nice looking plate, and serving it. You want to move your piece of salmon about and through your kitchen in the best and most convenient way. In the woodshop, you are taking a forty pound slab of plywood, cutting it to size, and so on - you get the idea. You want to do it in the best and most convenient way. The storage, cutting, spicing, and finishing, and plating problems are much the same, but the stuff is heavier. You still have to put the work centers in the right order, store things in the perfect place, work at a comfortable height, and clean up afterwords.

What would it be like to design a shop perfectly suited to building kitchens, and at the same time, refine our design to make it better, more flexible, and easier to build? Maybe through such efficiencies, we could make our work a bit more affordable, and maybe even make a little extra income for ourselves. Wouldn't that be fun.

Around this time I encountered another set of ideas that was just as important and interesting as “Motion Study.” That was the idea of Lean Engineering, also known as The Toyota Manufacturing System. The most well-known idea from Lean Engineering is that of “just-in-time delivery”. That means you don't inventory a lot of parts or supplies, you make your suppliers bring them just as you need them. Similarly, you don't inventory the things you make and then wait for someone to buy them. When you have an order, you make it up, and send it out the door, almost in one continuous motion. This saves space, but it also saves an enormous amount of work, specifically the work involved in handling your building materials at the beginning of the project, and storing and handling your product after building it.

Another “Lean” concept that is particularly relevant to the woodworker (particularly one without huge funds or huge ambitions) is to design your shop to be very adaptable. Instead of huge, expensive machines that do one operation efficiently, you have a lot of small machines that can do a variety of things, that you can move around as needed, based on the work in hand. Another key idea is “one piece flow”. Rather than, for example, making all the dovetails for all the drawers for all the cabinets, then set them aside to assemble later, you might instead make and install a single set of drawers completely. Saves work minimizes moving stuff around the shop endlessly. Most important, you catch errors early, and can adjust as needed. It leads you closer to “error free” building. Like my Toyota truck.

So, seven years ago, armed with these two powerful and (frankly) inspirational sets of ideas, we built a small but wonderful shop, all on one floor, with a nice loading dock almost exactly the height of the bed of my truck, with a few big table saws and lots of small tools that are always set up to do the many tasks that go into building our cabinets. We have a fleet of rolling carts to help us move stuff, various vacuums to suck the dust and fumes away. The paint store is two minutes away, the lumber yard ten.

Building this, and setting up this little business had been mostly fun and always interesting. My personal hope is that as I get older, the good design invested in the shop will make it possible for me to work as long and as much as I want, with less physical strain, good light, and good safety.

Another reason I wanted to start this business was to work with Ian Maas. I met Ian when I was working and teaching at Goddard College. We worked together on projects there, and later at Iron Bridge Woodworkers. It's been fun collaborating with him for the past seven years, applying the ideas above, and slowly improving our ways of working and the kitchens we are building.