The Kitchen Built From Grandpa’s Barn
Summer
I built faces all summer. I am a teacher, so I had June and July and most of August, and I used almost every day of it.
Megan said it was the most she had seen of my back since we were married.
The barn wood was all different thicknesses, so I planed every board on the back side only, to bring it flat and even, and left the weathered front face alone.
Then I cleaned the front with a stiff nylon brush and a shop vacuum, to get the dirt out without taking off the gray.
You could still see the red. Not much of it. A little in the deep grain, a little where the paint had been protected by a batten or a hinge.
Megan wanted me to keep every bit of it, so I did.
The face frames went together with pocket screws and glue. The doors are rail and stile, with the barn wood for the frame and a flat panel of the same wood floating in the middle, so it can move with the seasons.
The finish is a water based clear coat, satin, three coats, rubbed out between.
Owen did the drawers with me. All twenty-two of them. The boxes are baltic birch with dovetailed corners that I cut on a jig and he fit and glued.
He sanded every one, put the slides on every one, and made the fronts line up to within a sixteenth of an inch, because I told him I would check, and I did.
He signed the bottom of the first drawer in pencil. Owen Hanson, age 9, July. He did not tell me he did it.
I found it later, when I was installing it, and I did not say anything to him about it. I just put it in the top left drawer of the island, where it will be as long as the house is standing.
Diane called in July to ask what we were doing for the county fair, and Megan said I was busy in the shop. “What’s he building now?” Diane asked. Megan said cabinets. There was a long quiet on the line.
“Well,” Diane said finally. “I hope they turn out.”
Megan told me about it that night, and she was angry. “She thinks you’re out there building something out of a kit,” she said. “She thinks it’s going to look like a junior high project.”
“Let her think it,” I said. “It’s not for her.”
Megan looked at me a while. “You’re not doing this to show her up?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it, mostly. “I’m doing it because I should have done it ten years ago. If she likes it, good. If she doesn’t, you’ll still have a kitchen.”
Fall
School started back in August and I went back to nights. By the first of October, the shop was full.
Upper cabinets on one wall, lowers on another, the island in three pieces in the middle of the floor, doors leaning against everything with cardboard between them.
We tore the old kitchen out on Columbus Day weekend. Kurt came out and helped me get the uppers down, and we hauled the old cabinets to the end of the lane with a sign that said Free.
They were gone by Sunday night. Somebody wanted them for a garage.
For three weeks we lived on a microwave and a hot plate in the dining room and washed dishes in the bathtub. Lily thought it was camping. Megan did not think it was camping.
I did the counters last. I could not afford stone, so I called around to lumberyards in Cedar Rapids and found two slabs of maple butcher block in a pale tone that went with the barn wood.
They cut both of them to size for nine hundred and sixty dollars.
The island top I made myself, from oak planks that had been the floor of the granary. Glued up, flattened, oiled.
It is a little rough in places, a few old nail holes I filled with dark epoxy. Megan says that is the best part.
When it was all in, I sat down at the dining room table with every receipt in a shoebox and added it up.
Plywood, slides, hinges, pulls, glue, screws, finish, the kiln, the two butcher block slabs, the epoxy, a new faucet I had not planned on, the metal detector.
Three thousand, two hundred and six dollars.
I showed Megan the number.
She looked at it and laughed, and then she cried a little, and then she went and stood in the middle of the new kitchen with her arms folded and turned around in a slow circle.
“Grandpa’s barn,” she said. “I’m standing in Grandpa’s barn.”
The pantry door was the last thing I hung. I had built it as a big sliding barn door on a black iron rail, with Merle’s stall board set into the front, so the letters sat at about the height of a little girl’s eyes.
I hung it on a Tuesday night in the middle of November, and nobody said anything for a long time.