We didn’t want to do kitchen countertops at this point, but the kids kept getting hurt while swinging and standing on the pile of oak slabs I’ve had stacked out there drying.
After re-arranging the pile a couple times to make it more stable, my wife finally said, “We should bring these in and see if we can get them ready to make countertops.” Then I talked to the neighbor who made some pine countertops for his son’s house and found out he was having back surgery in a week, and wouldn’t be much help after that for a while. It sounded like it was “go time” on countertops. So, we put everything else on hold to see what we could do about kitchen countertops.
Finishing the kitchen
The kitchen is in various stages of completion – the upper cabinets are secure, the island is in place. The wiring and plumbing is done, and all the chinking is done, and the beams are poly’d. It’s getting close. One thing that would really push it closer to the finish line is hooking up the sink to the plumbing and drain line, which means we needed countertops. And we’ve been tripping over the lower cabinets for about a year; it would be really nice to have another room done.
Countertops are the thing holding up finishing the kitchen at this point, so finishing them became the focus.
We couldn’t get what we wanted with Soapstone
Folks who follow this blog might remember our frustration trying to buy a piece of Soapstone. Those guys refused to sell us a piece large enough to make the island and the countertops for the kitchen sink and by the stove, so we gave up and only got the island as a piece of soapstone. It looks gorgeous. We needed something equally gorgeous for the kitchen sink. We got a sink from Craigslist in Nashville – had my friend Allen pick it up – paid him $50 for it – well – he paid the seller, and wouldn’t let us pay him any more than what he paid. He was tickled because he got a deal on a cabinet or something at the same time, so it was no big deal for him. Anyway, it’s a Kohler double sink, cast iron and porcelain, and it weighs a ton. My wife calls it a “grown up sink” – and doesn’t want me washing my greasy hands in it after I work on the car.
If you do anything too similar to soapstone – granite, concrete, imitation granite (formica), or anything else, it’s going to clash with the soapstone. You need something “complementary” that doesn’t compete with the soapstone. Wood is a good option. I liked the idea of pine, but I think a softwood wouldn’t stand up to years of use and would probably dent too easily. Hardwoods are expensive, but not if you can make them yourself. Oak is extremely dense – not very porous – and hard enough to withstand a lot of dents from kitchen gadgets. And if you seal it well, it should withstand stains and rot.
We also couldn’t get what we wanted with store bought counter tops. Since the wall is made of logs, the distance from the log to the front of the counter varied between 28″ – 30″. The standard counter top is 25″. We had to account for putting a channel in the log to make everything straight. So it would have to be a custom counter top. I found a website that you can order oak counter tops in custom sizes – What we did would have cost over $3,000:
Oak Countertops
When we couldn’t get soapstone everywhere in our kitchen, we found a blog of a lady who made countertops out of pine lumber – it looked great. Julie liked it, too. And then I was talking to my neighbor, and mentioned the idea to him and he said he was doing that exact thing for his son’s cabinets. I watched him make them – it looked easy enough on a table saw, plane the edges flat, glue it all together, then cut out a hole for the sink and fit it in place. And what do you know? I looked out back, and I had some extra oak from when I was making posts for the balcony railing that I had cut into 2.5″ slabs. Julie wanted this wood for a new coffee table. I went through and measured – sure enough, I had enough for a 30″ x 120″ counter top, plus enough for two side counters for our electric stove.
The difficulty was that my neighbor and this lady with her pine were both able to start with straight flat lumber. I had to start with oak slabs I milled with live edges and plenty of knots. And 2.5″ is just too thick for countertops – the ones in the store are 1.5″ at the thickest. So I had to plane them down a lot. I can’t emphasize the “a lot” part enough – this planer takes off 1/16 of an inch at a time, if the blades are very sharp. They don’t stay sharp with oak, so I was really getting about 1/32″ at a time. That means sending 14 boards through 16+ times – at least 200+ feeds, which is very tiring. But I now have seven garbage bags full of oak shavings – a lifetime supply.
Making oak countertops from scratch
Picked out the best slabs to start with. 
Sending the slabs through the planer. They had to go from 2.5″ down to 1.5 inches. I could only take off 1/32″ – 1/16″ at a time, so it took a lot of passes. 
I filled up 7 garbage bags of shavings. They burn great, or make great compost! 
Finally got it down to less than 2″! I kept going until it was 1 5/8″.
And by scratch, I literally did everything but grow the tree (thank you, God!). Here’s the steps:
- Cut down an oak tree about 2 years before you need it.
- Mill it into slabs (make them 2″, not 2.5″ like I did). I should have made them all 10′ long, but I didn’t know I was going to make a countertop, so I made them all 5′ long instead.
- Stack and sticker it to dry. Paint the ends of the slabs if you don’t have a kiln. Let it dry for at least a year. Two years is better. Realize that you’ll never get it to “kiln dried” moisture content, which is 8-10%. Best you can get is probably 20%. But oak is pretty stable.
- Plane all the pieces this way:
- Find the thickest piece and the thinnest piece. The thin piece is your target. Start with the thickest piece – set the planer to this thickness and run all the slabs through.
- Lower the planer, and run all the slabs through again.
- Keep lowering the planer until the thinnest piece gets all it’s rough sawn surface removed by the planer.
- Now all the boards will be the same thickness.
- Cut the boards into strips about 3″ wide (see note below on “using wide boards”).
- Mix and match the strips until you get a consistent color / pattern / arrangement.
- Make a pattern of the sink and countertop to make sure the measurements are right before making any major cuts in any boards. Cardboard is easier to cut than oak. We laid out the boards roughly where they would go to make sure there’s no wonky grain features, too.
- Lay out the boards on a very flat surface and glue everything together and let it dry (see note on “assembling counters” below).
- Lay it in place, then sand to fit and apply several coats of poly to finish it. Install mounting hardware underneath to attach it in some key places to the cabinets.
Using wide boards
After planing the boards down, I let them sit over night in the cabin. The next day, I noticed all of them had started splitting in the ends – even the wide ones. You can see in this picture where they started to split:
It was a disaster! We really wanted to use these boards, but how could we build a countertop if it was just going to split open? We decided to do pine at that point – you can buy kiln dried lumber anywhere, and you can get it in 10′ lengths – it would be perfect for our situation, or so we thought. The trouble was we couldn’t find pine that matched the pantry door, or the color of the logs or other wood in the kitchen. It was either yellow pine or white pine that we found. And staining pine doesn’t give consistent results. This countertop was supposed to be complementary to the soapstone island, but pine in the wrong color would really stand out – and not in a good way, we thought.
After a few days of discussing our options and feeling depressed about it – I really wanted wide boards – we were sitting in my daughter’s bedroom where I used a few extra stair treads I made to make her a temporary desktop for her computer. I looked at how I did it – I cut the wood into 2″ strips and glued them together, and none of the stair treads have split. Maybe it was still possible to get oak counters? I had to give up the idea of thick 10″ boards. It all depended on where the splitting was happening.
That afternoon, I measured the splits – they were occurring about every 3″ in the wide boards. I had a lot of 6″ boards, some 8″, about 4 @ 10″ boards, and various other sizes. I calculated how much waste I’d have, and whether I’d have enough wood to build the counters, and it looked like I could do it. Julie said go ahead and try, so I did. I lined up the table saw so I would get the most out of each board – cutting them along the splits and trying to eliminate any edges that were too close to where the bark had previously been, and ended up with about 8″ of waste out of 14 boards! The strips looked beautiful – nice consistent color and straight grain throughout. Julie fell in love with the boards at that point.
I think I know why they split: I didn’t paint the ends of the slabs to dry. Since the ends dry faster than the middle, this meant the wood was under a lot of stress due to the uneven moisture distribution. When I planed the slabs, they lost some of their strength and started to split at the driest and weakest point: the ends. This is my theory, anyway.
Cutting a channel in the log
Most people have a backsplash on their counter. We could have done that, but the log behind the sink isn’t perfectly in line with the cabinets (because it’s a log, right?). We decided to cut a channel in it, and make the counter fit into the channel. And then seal it with poly and some silicone to make it water tight.
I had to cut out another inch to get the cabinet to sit back far enough. And you thought I was done with the chainsaw! 
Started with the flush cut saw to get a line going. 
Used a sawzall (not shown) to cut a deep groove, then chiseled it out the old fashioned way. Took me all day to get this right, due to the cramped space I was working in. 
Nice tight fit – looks like it just disappears into the log.
Biscuits
I wanted to just glue the strips together like I did for the stairs, but my neighbor strongly suggested I use his biscuit jointer to assemble the counters. I had used a biscuit jointer before when I worked at a cabinet shop, so I was familiar with the idea of them. Stronger is better, so I used the jointer.
When you put glue on the biscuits, they swell up inside the joint to make everything that much tighter. They mostly keep things aligned, but I still used vertical clamps to keep the bow out of some boards.
Assembling counters
Working with the 3″ strips, I ran into a problem – the gap between the back of the cabinets and the log wall was more than 3″. I already knew I had to cut a channel in the log to accept the counter top (we are not doing a backsplash – the log is the backsplash). I tried holding the strip of oak up to the log to get a good test fit using little supports I could shove back there, but we needed to see the whole thing, end to end, to make sure it was square with the front of the cabinets. We decided to glue 3 boards together so we could see how it would fit in the gap before gluing the rest onto it. After letting it dry for 2 days, we took the clamps off and found I was 1/16″ too proud in the back on one side. Also, the top of the gap was too low – it was making the counter slope toward the wall which is bad – you don’t want moisture pooling up in back – you want the counter to slope just slightly away from the wall.
With that fitment doing well, we started prepping the other strips for gluing. And had an argument about how to finish the whole thing. My idea was to glue the whole countertop in one shot, then plane the whole thing with a hand planer, then sand and finish it. My wife wanted to glue 10″ sections of counter, then use the thickness planer to get the sections flat, then glue the sections together and sand. I thought it was a bad idea at first because how could you get all the sections to line up for the final glue up? I looked up online whether this was a thing, sure that everyone would say it’s a bad idea – and found that it wasn’t a bad idea. Quite a few articles say it works fine this way.
With my mind changed, we decided to go with her plan: glue all the sections, then run all of them through the planer, then glue them up and sand and install.
The plan! 
Test clamping the first section. 
Biscuit jointer. 
Gluing the first section. 
A man can never have too many clamps. Note the “tiger striping” in that middle board at the bottom of the photo. 
Gluing the middle sections. The vertical clamps hold the boards flat. 
Gluing the last (front) section. I ran out of clamps, believe it or not.
Finishing the counters
Dale showing me how he would cut the sink hole. 
You thought we were done with the planer? No – after the sections were glued, my wife suggested planing them just a bit more. 
Finally – gluing the whole thing together. After planing these sections, everything was pretty flat, so no vertical clamps were needed. 
I made a template for the sink out of cardboard – made it 1″ smaller on all sides – then cut it out with a skill saw (for the straight cuts)… 
And my neighbor’s jig saw for the round corners. Doesn’t have to be perfect – it will never be seen. 
Had to add a piece here because of an indentation in the log. 
After drying, we went back and filled in the little cracks with sawdust + glue. The bigger cracks got filled in with paper-thin wedges and glue. 
My wife got comfortable working on this thing, filling in cracks. Made it beautiful.
Just want to include a note here about our amazing neighbor, Dale Heinlein – he lives two doors down, and has a wood shop and lots of tools. He’s been intrigued with the cabin from the beginning, and has always been super helpful and supportive. Last year, he plowed our garden for us, and I also borrowed his planer to make the stairs. And before that, he came over with his tractor to help grade the soil on the west side of our cabin to help drain it better during rain storms. I asked him about milling slabs for this counter top, and he just happened to be doing exactly the same thing for his son who lives about 10 minutes down the road. We went and looked at the finished product, and it gave me a lot of confidence that we could do the same with ours. He’s been a good friend and neighbor – he even gave me a key to his shop. We feel blessed to (soon) be living here with good folks like him. We really couldn’t have finished the counters without his help.
Finishing the counters is as much or more work than getting them ready to finish. Once we had the entire counter glued, it was time to test fit it again. For some reason, the left side didn’t fit as well as it had before we glued it – it wouldn’t push back far enough into the channel, so more chiseling. Also, the right side was probably the width of a saw blade too long, so I carefully cut it back some. Beyond those items, here’s how we finished it:
- Cut the counter to length. Also cut out the exact hole for the sink.
- Apply two coats of poly to the bottom of the counter. I had a fear that leaving the bottom untreated would cause a difference in the moisture distribution and maybe warp the counter. Also poly the channel in the log.
- Sand all the pencil marks and glue off the counter top. I used 220 grit.
- Vacuum all the dust and see where the cracks are. Fill the cracks either with glue+sawdust or spline wedges+ glue made out of extremely thin leftover oak pieces. Also fill in any gaping knotholes. A lot of this is an art, so I let my wife handle that part.
- Sand again; check for any cracks.
- If it looks good, apply the finish. It takes several coats, and we sanded lightly in between coats. We are using a Clear Satin water based polycrylic – let the grain speak for itself.
- Install counter top. I put a bead of silicone in the channel area, and also below the visible end adjacent to the wall – no trim! I also used slotted angle brackets and cleats to allow for expansion.
The finished product
One note about milling the oak slabs
Back before kilns were widely available (they still aren’t to most folks, but Lowe’s is…), high-end oak furniture was made from oak that was sawn in such a way to avoid warping and shrinking over time. The milling method is known as “quarter sawn wood”, and it’s basically sawing the wood in quarters, and then making slabs out of it:
You get less wood out of a log this way (thus it was used for spendy “high end furniture”), but you get wood that is less likely to warp. That came in handy 120 years ago because kiln dried wood wasn’t common. These days, kilns get the moisture out of the wood, so warping isn’t much of an issue anymore. You can tell if you are looking at a piece of quarter sawn wood by noticing the grain pattern. You can see the striped flecks in the image above – this is known as “tiger striping”. On finished furniture, it looks like this:
Now, I had no idea about milling in this manner – I just couldn’t fit the large logs through my mill, so I took my chainsaw and quartered the log, and then milled the quarters – and ended up with some beautiful tiger striping in my counter tops:
I take no credit for it; it’s just a happy accident. Those don’t happen very often, but I’ll take it.
Next steps
We still need to paint a few cabinets on the kitchen island (her), install drawer pullers and door knobs (me), and hook up the sink plumbing, but this was a major milestone in the kitchen.
On that note, I cleaned up the living room – all the tools are going upstairs so we can get things ready to move in.
So now it’s HVAC, bathrooms, and exterior stairs.
loghomejourney 
I’ll get my schedule figured out for next week and check with you on yours. Many thanks!
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I’ve been following your build since you we’re skinning logs. I must say that I’m wowed with every update, sir! I’ve got half of my logs up on my forever cabin now and finished skinning the last of my wall logs two days ago. Time for a stacking party the end of May.
I would really like to come visit you at some point to see your progress and pick you brain. I’m in middle Georgia.
Thanks in advance,
~ Todd
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Yes, I remember when you started following! swing by – we are in Madison county, AL.
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