Merritt College land/hort outdoor kitchen facelift

 

Out door kitchen revival

This project has been a great collaboration with most of the class, if not all the students. Carlos and I have seemed to be the two more dedicated and decided to use this experience as our research project.

            When beginning the planning stages of the kitchen revival, we had ideas ranging from cabinet doors, new shelving, bamboo hanging racks, window retrofit, new plaster etc… We decided to focus on a realistic goal and that was to level the ground, create some kind of floor and fabricate cabinet doors for under and around the sink and storage areas.

Raising and leveling the floor

            When we were ready to raise the floor we decided that it made sense to raise it and level it to the existing concrete foundation, which were the four corners of the kitchen. We first needed to pull out the existing shelf to gain access to the entire floor space. Then we started filling it in with decomposed granite from onsite with about 1-2 inch layers, wetting each layer and then tamping each layer level. It took about a dozen wheelbarrow loads to get up the 6 inches or so we needed to meet the foundation pillars. We left a bit of room for bricks to be laid under the counter space so that the brick would be level with the rest of the floor and foundation. We also cut 2X4’s and secured them with rebar to hold the DG and bricks in place around the uneven sides of the perimeter. After the floor and bricks we secure and level we could move on to planning the cabinet doors and frame.

Cabinet frame and doors

Since the space under the counters where the doors were planned to go was void of any structure to secure doors we needed to build a frame. We came to the conclusion to use 2X4’s for the frame and the door frames because we felt there were enough on site and this would make for a durable end result. The frame itself would be two rectangle frames tied to the existing structure and to each other at the 90 degree angle in the middle. Depending on the rigidity of that structure we would see if it needed to be further reinforced with corner braces. Carlos already started building the door units as we planned the frame and cut the lumber. With the area we had it made sense to have two doors on the left side and three under the sink area, since it was longer. The doors were made into frames with a open center to later be filled with bamboo. The areas were measured and the door lumber was cut then biscuit jointed and glued together. Once the glue was dry we used a router on the backside of each door to create a recess for installing bamboo inserts.

More to come....