Look how pretty my floor is by now! I feel really great about getting this much of it in and being able to look at it. But here is the problem. I can’t really go much further. My plan has been to make frames (holes) in the finished floor down to the subfloor that the table legs will drop down into. I think this will make for a really solid table leg. I now realize, because of the whole experience of installing the frame around the floor vent, that making something like this is no trivial job. I can’t go much further in building the floor until I have the table legs positioned. I will have to build a mockup of the table, then I can build the two legs, get them all ready to attach to a table, I can use them to position the blocks on the floor. Really I can’t position the legs until I have the leg set built. So it is a series of catch-22s.
I know now that to build this frame into the floor I need to have some space leading up to it to begin to plan where the seams will line up. So the flooring is partially done but now on hold.
My main news is last night I went to my friend Craigie’s house and we installed the kitchen countertop. He had put his hands on a 56 inch length of Paperstone. I needed 52 inches, so this piece was perfect! If you are not familiar with Paperstone, it is just that. It is made out of recycled paper and a non-petroleum based resin, hard as a rock. You wouldn’t think much of it really from hearing that description but I tell you what, it is a great material!
Remember when I mentioned how hard Paperstone is? Here is an example. Craigie was cutting the straight runs with a skilsaw with a new blade. He could only cut a few inches at a time because the blade would heat up so much it would warp and bind in the cut. I was cutting the round corners of the sink and cooktop. I put a new blade in my jigsaw. I would cut an inch, and it cut pretty well. The next two inches were not near so easy and by the fourth inch, that blade was shot. I used five blades in the process of cutting eight corners!
I mentioned this a while back but I took a material saving shortcut in building the floor to ceiling shelf. Because a sheet of plywood is 48 inches wide, I cut it in half to get two pieces at 24. But really I only got twenty two inches of that by the time I got it shaped to fit the exterior wall of the van. On the other end though, where the cooktop is going to be, I absolutely needed the 24 inches, as clearance for the flame of the burner. In my temporary, particle board countertop, I accounted the need for this by making a jog, out and around the cooktop. Doing this in the Paperstone however, would be a much greater problem. Shaping and smoothing an inside corner would be very difficult.
We used my particle board top as a template. I hadn’t done a real good job of cutting it out. It was after all just a prototype. For one thing it wasn’t cut real square so we marked on the board a couple of places where we had to add a little to the size. We cut a long taper from the stove jut-out to 3/4” beyond where my floor to ceiling shelf will line up with it. That way I will be able to put a trim strip on the front of the shelf and cover the plywood edge.
I was a little bummed out because I bought an under the counter mount sink and these don’t work well at all with Paperstone. For one thing, there is the shaping of the inside corner again. Maybe it could have been done with a drill-sized drum sander and a whole passel of sanding drums. I bet it would have been a time consuming job to make this corner look nice. But beyond this, another “problem” with Paperstone is nothing sticks to it. In use this is a great feature. This us the attribute that makes it so stain resistant. But in this case it is a disadvantage because even silicone adhesive won’t stick for very long. Proven to us in fact because it had previously mounted to a counter using silicone and when I was cleaning the peice up, getting ready to start making and cutting it, that bead of silicone pulled off easily and cleanly in one big long rubbery strip. It was easy and the Paperstone wasn’t marked or stained in any way.
We could have maybe gotten around this non-stick issue by building a support frame under the sink but it all really seemed like just too much work. I guess I will live with my surface mounted sink. First world problems!
Being in the business, Craigie has every size of Milwaukee hole saw imaginable. We were able to find exactly the right size for cutting the faucet hole and soap dispenser. But, I could tell by the bottom of drilling the holes I was going to be buying him a couple of new holesaw blades too. I don’t think any other type of bit would have cut it. I have a hunk of the scrap we cut off and one of the things I wanted to try was to see exactly how long a spade bit would last. I am guessing not long.
We popped it in for a test fit and it was neigh on perfect so we pulled it back out and cut the sink and stove holes.
Even though the material is really hard we decided it would still be a good idea to put a strip along the bar to keep it from sagging. For this, Criagie had some oak door trim. We glued and screwed it to the plywood of the wall.
Then to smooth the front cut edge we used a belt sander. Belt sanders to me are always a bit of a dangerous tool. They move a lot of abrasive surface area in a very short amount of time. So it is usually very easy to cut too deep and put a gouge in your project. Of course we didn’t have that issue with this material. It really took a long time of sanding to get even our very small saw marks out of the edge. This again reenforced the realization that sanding the inside corners of either the jog, or the undercounter sink corners would have been impossible.
Finally as a last step we used a router and cut a round over on the front top edge. Once done with that stop we installed it. The install was simply a matter of laying down a bead of silicone along the back and two sides and sitting the counter top in place. True, as I said the silicone won't hold it under great upward pressure, but to keep it from sliding around it works perfect.
Each time I complete one of these monumental projects I am amazed what this cargo van is becoming.
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