The Daily Hailey

Brady blog: entry #… I have no idea. I’m here again to blog about another project we took on this weekend.

We built a small outdoor kitchen at our campsite, next to the barbecue. Though it’s not much of a kitchen yet and more of a table with storage. 🤷‍♂️

This whole thing was built out of scraps from the deck roof build so we had to do some planning as to where to use the different materials we had.

We started with a basic structure and used the existing roof posts to our advantage.

Side note, Hailey had the idea to make it a bit taller than a standard kitchen countertop so that I could stand straight while I’m working at it. Standing at standard counters makes my back sore since my surgery because I have to lean over just a few degrees and my back doesn’t have the stamina for that anymore. 🤷‍♂️

Next was adding shelf supports and figuring out what to use for the back and sides of the cabinet.

I’m gonna be honest and tell you that there was some tension in these decisions and while I’d like to say I’m a decent builder, I’m not the best planner. But we came to a resolution with a small amount of hushed discussion and we were back on track.

At one point I may have found myself inside the box.

Maybe many times… 😂

Once I had the sides all filled in it was on to the shelves which we made out of two by material. Various 2x6s and 2x8s. Cut to length and screwed down. Very simple.

At that point Hailey had the idea to use 2×2 spindles glued together to create the countertop which I was totally on board with. 🙂 But we didn’t have enough spindles here to make the whole thing. So we waited for the next day when Cher was coming and she brought the rest of the spindles from the garage and we were back in action.

This isn’t the most clean and precise wood shop setup for glueing things up but it worked for our outdoor countertop.

I did end up glueing and clamping sections of spindles together and then glueing the sections together as I screwed them down. I didn’t want to screw each individual spindle down separately. And the glue ups worked well.

Then came notching and cutting the sections to fit in place. Last was screwing them down as you would with any countertop, from underneath so that there’s no screws through the top of the counter.

Hailey and I are both incredibly happy with it and we’ve used it a couple times already.

We also plan to add some doors to the front in the near future and maybe some more cabinets on either side of the barbecue next year. It’s a work in progress but this is a start. 😊