With my most recent class wrapped up I was finally able to get the laminated scrap lumber slab down to the mill at Zena Forest Products, the sustainable forest and sawmill owned by Ben Deumling just outside of Salem. With Ben's massive saw and planer we cut it into 1 inch slices and then planed down to 3/4 inch. Thanks Ben! (for beautiful and environmentally responsible flooring check out Ben's website.)
| Back at the shop I got started right away building counters, racing against a tight deadline to have the shop clear for an event in a couple days. Normally countertops would be no sweat, but in this case my fetish for thick slab wood worked against me because there is no way the trailer could handle the weight of full dimension slab counters. The solution was to reinforce the bottom of the thin counter slices with cross pieces and glue an edge strip around the perimeter, keeping things light but still looking weighty. | 
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Because everything in a tiny structure has to do some sort of double duty, planning and layout can be a bit mentally taxing. compounding is building directly into the floor and walls to save weight. In two days I built 4 counters with legs, a small table, and a lid for the refrigerator. We coated it with three layers of the same Vermont Natural Coatings Polywhey finish that I used on the floors.
Install day was a little hectic. With all sorts of last minute modifications and a looming deadline I hired my friend Henry to watch me flap about like a chicken and lend a hand as needed. I realized I hadn't accounted for the curvature of the wall, and had to backbevel the backsplashes on the fly. Also, we'd moved the refrigerator (which everything keys off of) without marking exactly where it was. I realized a support leg was partially blocking the sink hole and needed to be notched around a cross piece as well. The rivet gun jammed necessitating a complete rebuild before we could keep going. An electrical box that I'd moved to be out of the way of the counters was acutally still in the way and needed to be moved, again. Finally, level and plumb mean nothing when you are working in a vehicle that lifts and drops whenever someone shifts their weight, so level, or rather the degree of unlevel had to be taken at the floor and the transferred to the counter and then marked without anyone moving. Plumb was basically hopeless so we just eyeballed it. When it was all done though we had beautiful new counters made entirely of scrap wood salvaged from an old cottage. Neat!
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