this video is sponsored by Chomps there's one set of lower cabinets that remain in the kitchen and that is the peninsula and as you can see I've already put quite a bit of work into this I built the carcass in another video as well as all the drawers and now we're working on what I'm referring to as the exoskeleton so to support this I kind of want it to be a little bit more Airy it's sitting between the kitchen and the living room so it' be nice to have it be a little bit more furniture like so so I'm actually going to put legs on this rather than doing a toe kick and I got some beautiful white oak from woodworker Source then I'm going to start by Milling that up since this kitchen island is not only the centerpiece of the kitchen it's also the centerpiece of the whole house I wanted to pick something that was top quality so I chose this rifton white oak from woodworker Source rifton means that it's cut radiating out from the center of the tree which results in the straightest grain possible and a much more stable board to test the proportions of the island I decided to set up a couple of the boards on the corner to get a feel for the thickness and then make a couple sample pieces out of some scrap to see how I liked this bullnosed edge up against those fluted drawer fronts and I have to say I like it a lot before we get too deep into the build let's talk about the design of this penena because I think it's essential for understanding how I'm building it so I have done a lot of iterating on this design if you look back at the old version of the kitchen the peninsula had this rounded front edge and it had a toe kick underneath and as I worked more and more on the design I I kind of felt like that was looking too heavy and it was taking up too much space so I removed that rounded front edge and then put it on legs to elevate it and in doing that I had to design something that could support the cabinet that I had already built hence the exoskeleton since the legs run from the top of the cabinet all the way to the floor they will provide a lot of strength considering this cabinet is extremely heavy the curved inner Corners are inspired by the coved ceilings that I worked so hard to restore throughout the house been reflecting those throughout the build and those curves are the next thing that I need to troubleshoot in the [Applause] shop I figur that the best way to make those curves is with a template so I got some scrap plywood and started sketching it out the boards that I have are 5 and half in wide and so I want to be able to get two rails out of each board which means that I have you know comfortably about 2 and 1 12 Ines to work within so really that's my parameter and so I made it as wide as possible and then figured out the radius using a circle finder once I had the top section figured out I could transfer those those measurements over to the lower section for both the bottom of the panel and the bottom of the leg and for those of you curious what this tool is this is called the Rockler rule stop they really knocked it out of the park with this thing I love it it's great for making layout lines like this I'll leave a link in the description if you're interested so over to the drill press I can make holes all the way through you can see that I've got two panels stacked up and I originally did this so that I could just see what two of them looked like together make sure that I liked it but it ends up being pretty valuable in the end ultimately I'm going to drill this out with a hole saw but I'm using these holes that I'm pre-drilling as a guide I am not a fan of whole saws I find them to be wrist Breakers and incredibly annoying because they don't generally get a clean cut it's also a total wrestling match to use one this size the top one was looking pretty rough I'm not going to lie but fortunately the bottom one I was able to score the veneer and I got a nice clean top Edge I just had to be real careful approaching it from the from the other side and I think with all the practice from doing the first side I was able to get some clean cuts in there and fortunately the pre-drilled holes made it really easy to keep it square with the whole saw drama over with I can move over to the table saw and cut the panels down to width I slid the fence over and then trimmed up the foot the interior cut was a little more complicated I set up a fence on my resaw band saw and then slotted it in and slid it against the fence I wasn't sure how well this was going to work it was going to keep a straight line but it did great after a bit of clean up at the workbench I had myself a complete template I use that template to set up my taable soft fence it can cut all the boards to width the legs on the corner need to be mitered together so I used my digital measuring kit from Rockler to set up a nice 45° angle so I can get a Precision cut this kit is great and if you order anything from Rockler make sure you use the free shipping code alfab at checkout for anything over $49 there's more details in the description [Music] this miter is a pretty critical element of this build I wanted to make sure that it came together correctly so I taped up to test the fit and check it with a square it doesn't get much better than that the plan is to use this template as a router template but there's so much material that I need to get rid of that I need to take out the bulk of it so I traced out my pattern onto the boards so I can cut away that excess material back over to the resaw band saw this is the best tool for removing this material as quick as possible I really like using a Sharpie for making these marks because I can cut outside of that line and that's pretty much the width that I'm allowing myself to trim back to so as long as I'm outside that line I'm perfectly safe and I can cut away as much material as possible now I have a pretty thick blade on here so it requires quite a few Cuts I kind of do this like SC cutting where I cut sort of uh in as far as I can back it up and then cut it a little bit more and then I trim out as much as I can before I do the straight because then I can insert my blade and then run it along that [Applause] length this build is pretty router heavy and that's actually kind of intentional I've been challenging myself to get better at using a router and thinking more in terms of what kind of shapes you can produce with a router I like that it allows for these more complex shapes and uh more rounded edges something that I find I end up defaulting to rectangular forms over and over again in my furniture and that doesn't have to be the case template routing I feel like is opening up a whole new area of woodworking for me uh it's going to give me a lot of chance to experiment with forms and I'm excited to continue to try this as I grow as a maker each Board gets double stick taped to the router template and then taken over to the router trimmed up and then repeat that process six times to finish off all six legs [Music] i m up the rails for the top and bottom of the side panels and cut them all to length with all the parts cut I can lay them out and see how they look I want to arrange these as best as possible I already match the two mitered pieces so they look similar but I just want to check and make sure that the coloration is right between all the different pieces and uh and just make it look as good as possible once I've decided on my layout I then label each individual joint then I can stack up all the parts and prep for joinery the plan is to join all this together with Domino or floating tenin I'm going to put two on each joint one on each side so basic Bally I just have to find the centers on the corresponding joints with everything laid out I grab my Domino Joiner and start hogging out mortises [Music] with all the mortises done I can Resort all the parts make sure that they're lined up with the correct sections and begin the glue up process rather than try and glue up this giant thing in one go I decided to glue it up in panels so three visible panels that need to be glued up and once I do that I can start fitting other parts to those parts allowing me to take my time and get everything nice and accurate the mitered pieces presented their own sort of issue it was really hard to not destroy the miter in the process but I found by putting it in my tail Vie that prevented it while hammering but it's a different story when it came to using the clamps so it's day two and I left these to sit overnight now there was a little bit of drama in the glue up the main thing is that these miters were crushing as I was putting more and more pressure on them so before the glue set up I took them out of the clamps and then noticed that there was a little bit of a wonk to this just like it was rocking in two of the corners so I clamped it down the table in hopes to see that if that worked I haven't unclamped them now so fingers crossed hopefully they're flat the crushed miters is not really that big of a deal because I'm going to round over most all of the edges and I don't think it crushed quite deep enough but I couldn't put so much pressure on it that I I ruined these miters so in hindsight maybe I should have cut the miters later but uh let's just see what we have and hopefully we can work with this still there a little bit SS pretty good I feel like that level of flex was enough that I could remove that when uh when I'm clamping it up so I sanded up the parts and got ready for the next step so on the inside of each of these leg sets there's going to be a plywood pain panel and to receive that plywood panel I'm using this rabbiting bit with a bearing on the top so I can run it along the inside and cut a quarter inch rabbit that follows the curves the panels I'm using are half inch and I didn't feel confident enough that this rabbiting bit could handle a full/ inch in one go so I did it in two cuts the rabbits came out super clean and at the perfect depth so that when I add the veneer they should be flush so let's talk about shop snacks there is an art to picking out the right shop snack I often forget to eat when I'm deep into a project and have to search for something to keep me going candy is dangerous chips just make me want to eat more so these days my go-to snack is Chomps they're packed with protein and made with real ingredients to keep your energy up all day and you can feel good about it Chomps are sustainably sourced protein snacks with no nasty stuff they're made from grass-fed beef with 10 to 12 G gr of protein and no sugar they come in a bunch of different flavors like original beef jalapeno sea salt and original turkey plus they have a mini version called Chom Lings these are perfect to throw in a bag when you head out the door the awesome Folks at Chomps who sponsor this video would love to know what flavor you'd like to see next so drop your ideas in the comments below if you want to try Chomps for yourself click the link in my description to learn more thanks Chomps these are delicious now let's get back to the build what did I tell you this is a router heavy build so this is the third router bit change I'm going to a rounding over bit and I'm going to round over all those hard edges [Music] [Music] at this point I wasn't quite sure what the next step was so I decided to assemble everything that I had take a step back and see if I liked how it was coming together all right I have a dry fit here and in general I really like it I wanted to see it all kind of come together because one thing to make a 3D model it's another thing to see it in person and I really love how these leg are coming together the curves they match the Curves in the ceiling and throughout the kitchen that's kind of the design detail that I'm drawing from I like everything except for I was debating about cutting this leg off to make it a little bit more streamlined but I ask people on Instagram they said that's not uh that's not a good idea most people seem to like this leg but a lot of people said that it's too chunky and I have to kind of agree with them I wasn't really thinking when I was designing this I probably should have made this smaller uh on side so that when it came together it was the same size as one of these but now that ship's kind of sailed because these are a fixed length and I would have to widen them in order for it to fit over the cabinet so what I'm thinking about doing now and I actually think this is a good this is a good plan is to uh test out putting a Cove on just down the middle of it I was going to put a chamfer before and do a shadow line but I think a Cove is going to tie a lot of this stuff back in that I'm doing on the drawers and I think is going to give that shadow line and make it a little bit thinner so that it kind of matches the size of these legs I mean hopefully that works because otherwise I got to start over [Music] all right that was totally the right move oh that looks so much better yep all right on to the next step I still have some stickyback veneers left over from the drawers in the fridge surround so I decided to use that to veneer some Baltic Birch panels to go inside of the rabbits I cut out three panels to the corre width and height but I also need to deal with the rounded Corners so I laid one of the panels on top and traced out the corners and then took that over to the sander to sand them down this white oak veneer has a pre-applied adhesive layer on the back side of it so all I have to do is cut it to the correct width and then I can peel back half of the protective layer revealing the adhesive I then lay it onto the panel Center it and once I feel confident I can peel back the rest of that protective layer and then apply some pressure it's really important to clean your panel uh I actually sanded these panels off camera and clean them with mineral spirits before this process that just makes sure that you get the best possible Bond I cut the veneer a little wider than the panel just so that I had a bit of excess I can cut that excess off really easily with an X-Acto Knife I don't really want to deal with any glue squeeze out and I kind of like the idea of you know worse comes to worse I could replace these panels later on if we had any issues so I decided to go with pocket hole screws for the joinery I set those panels aside I won't really need them until I start applying finish but for now I need to work on the side that's going up against the wall I didn't want to use any of that beautiful Oak against that wall because you'll literally never see it so I grabbed some popler out of my scrap wood pile and cut it down to size while I was Milling the rest of the legs I also M up a seventh one and I can use this to Mark out where I want my joinery to go if it matches up on both sides then it it'll be nice and square I then cut out a couple slots for some dominoes into the glued up leg assembly I also match those slots on the popler pieces as well as that seventh leg and while I have the Domino Joiner out I might as well cut slots into the two middle panels as well connecting the Cove that I made earlier I'm not using glue quite yet because I have to take some measurements I need to build a platform that the carcass can sit on and I don't really know how those measurements are going to work out so I decided to do a dry fit of all the parts that I've made so far the platform is going to be made out of a couple of 1x4s of popler I laid it on to the exoskeleton and traced out my line so I can cut it on the chopsaw I also cut a couple cross pieces this is a pretty arbitrary length but I just wanted to make sure that that front edge is not going to be visible from a standing position so I set it back a couple inches from the drawer fronts the structure was looking nice and square everything was fitting up great so now it's time to commit and actually glue this whole thing together I dominoed all the parts of the platform and then started in on the glue up figuring out the correct order of operations was a little bit tricky on this I decided to glue the platform and the seventh leg up first then I glued the two back leg assemblies together with those two pieces together I could accurately measure to lay out all of my dominoes for the bottom panel I knew that I needed to end with the miter joint because that's going to be the most freaky to install the most complicated and so I started at the opposite side with that seventh leg I glued that to the bottom panel and then I added in the back panel that I assembled before those glue-ups went very smoothly so now I could turn my attention to the miter joint I started by gluing up the bottom panel and I decided not to put any dominoes in between the miter I'm just going to use clamps because it's a long grain glue up and honestly I think that the dominoes are just going to cause problems in there and I feel more confident just using clamps with all the other bits of the joinery assisting in holding this miter in place all I needed to do was add a couple of Rockler one-handed bar clamps and some tape to pull that miter together I was getting some nice glue squeeze out from top to bottom so it felt pretty confident that this glue up went well with the clamps removed and the blue tape taken off it looked good but the ultimate test is when I run a router bit across it do that round over you're definitely going to see if there are any [Music] gaps this miter probably had me the most nervous of anything on this project and it came out perfect I mean perfect so happy I debated as to whether I wanted to do self-leveling feet on this cabinet and uh honestly I just think that they don't look quite as good as if you level them in place since this floor is never changing and this thing is going to be permanently a fixed I decided to scribe the feet I left this whole thing about a/ qu inch taller than it needed to be so that I had room to cut the feet down you can see there's a Twist in the cabinet and when I lift up that front leg adding an eighth it levels the whole thing out I put handy shims underneath all the feet that needed it and then I could use a scribe tool to scribe the legs all the way around the base in theory cutting to those lines should mean that this thing will be perfectly level to the [Music] [Laughter] floor the Japanese Pula felt like the right tool for this job I was able to scratch a line all the way around each leg and as soon as I had a mark to follow I could then cut all the way through it left a bit of chatter in the center but that was easily taken care of with a palm sander [Music] [Music] level level dead level sweet look at this this is the line that I was trying to hit right not that line that line perfect I seized the opportunity with that big assembly out of the workshop to glue up all the drawer fronts so let me explain why I'm gluing these up all over again so in the the last cabinet build video I preglued these panels for that cabinet for the lower two drawers and what happened to that so in the last video I kind of ignored the fact that the grain match was not very good between the sink cabinet and the cabinet next to it I was like I think it might just be me it might just be like I'm being too OCD and obsessive over this kitchen but I saw a lot of comments and also people on patreon I asked them what they thought of it most people agreed that it it kind of stuck out like a sore thumb so fortunately that panel that I glued up was the grain match for the cabinet that was right next to it so what I did was I took the two panels that I glued up I glued those together and then I cut them apart and made them into cabinet doors so they're now the cabinet doors for the sink cabinet and I'm back to square one with these so as a result I had to redo those panels and here we are I think that in the end the kitchen will look nicer because of it I'm not going to go into too much detail on making these drawer fronts basically because I covered it in the previous kitchen cabinet video if you're new to this whole series I've been working for well over a year on this house and we're coming up on the finish line which is super exciting this is the 15th video in this build series which is insane to me so if you haven't seen those earlier videos or if you want to watch them all over again I'll leave a link to a play list right here one thing that I noticed about having the exoskeleton in the kitchen was that it had a little bit of flex in the front end and I am worried that over time that the cabinet's going to kind of want to droop in the center so I decided might as well add an eighth leg [Music] [Applause] this leg will barely be seen it'll be kind of cered underneath the cabinet but I do want to make sure that it's nice and secure so I added in some threaded inserts this just seemed like a logical way to to attach it and one thing that I've learned from working with Oak is that it's always good to wax your threads before you install it it makes it the installation a lot easier and less likely to break the parts that you're working with with the inserts installed I am going to work a little bit on the Aesthetics of this I know you're barely going to see this thing but I figured giv it a few round overs will help match the other legs [Music] to install leg number eight I used a couple of washers counter sunk in and then a couple corresponding bolts I lined the bolts with the threaded inserts and secured it using a ratchet I'm not fully convinced that this extra leg was vital but I think that it just gives me a little bit of peace of mind and that makes me happy One Last Detail that I want to put on this thing before I start sanding and applying finish are some chamers on the feet this is going to prevent the feet from chipping out over time and uh it's also going to give it kind of a NIC or clean look while I scribed the feet they're not 100% perfect and this will make any gaps underneath kind of disappear one of my new favorite tools that I just added to my Arsenal is this little hand sanding pad it uses standard 5in sanding discs that you would use on your palm sander and so you can transfer those over and it's just great it's really ergonomic it's great for big projects like this I actually have them available for sale on my website alfab docomo bits as well as the pull saws my long-term goal with alfab is to move past the Amazon affiliate link that's a tough road to go but selling tools on my website is way more beneficial than anything I get from Amazon so thanks for going and visiting the website thanks for supporting what I do it's really the reason why I can make videos like this after almost an entire day of sanding and prep I was ready for finish I cleaned off off all the sawdust with air and then with some mineral spirits look at how cool that uh that grain is it's pretty wild and then for the finish I'm going to be using Rubio monote 5% Mist this is the same stuff that I've been using throughout the kitchen obviously I want the whole kitchen to match it's a two-part hard wax oil finish that you apply with the sponge and wipe off within 15 minutes despite the name monot I promise you that a second coat of this stuff goes a really long way it builds up a Sheen if you don't put a second coat on it looks a little bit flat but with two coats it looks amazing and it's going to wear a lot better I attached all the hardware and then I can move everything into the house and prepare for the install to think that the original design that I had and had for months was basically a box with a toe kick underneath it this is so much better I encourage people when you're designing Furniture to not go with your first instinct often it's a practical response to a practical problem sure it may work but if you want a design that's more interesting and different from what everybody else has made iterate having a year to work on this house has been a luxury and I think the results are better designs and things that I'm incredibly proud of I can't wait to share the rest of this project with you guys but until then let's see some beauty shots [Music] for those of you who stuck around at the end of the video here's little sneak peek this is the countertop material it's a quartz that's been engineered and it looks kind of like career marble but a lot easier to maintain this will be going in in the next couple weeks which I'm really excited about thank you to Chomps for sponsoring this video thank you as always to my patreon supporters if you want more behind the scenes more updates on what's going on in the house make sure you check out the patreon thanks so much for watching you guys are the best and I'll catch you on the next one [Music] [Applause]