this & that: Countertops – blogspot.com

WARNING: this is a really long post that is not very interesting to most people unless you want to know about how we stained and cut an undermount sink for our butcher block countertops. If you don't want to read all of that, just scroll down to the bottom to see my countertops in all of their beautifulness.

We chose the Numerar 1 1/2" beech butcher block countertops.

In the old house we had the Pronomen 1 1/4" , which I would have gone with this time as well, but they didn't have any in stock. With the old kitchen, we didn't stain the countertops. I just applied about many coats of Tung Oil to the countertops and kept the natural beech color. But in this kitchen, I wanted the countertops to be darker.

We started by measuring the length of countertop we needed and cut off the excess.

can you tell the wood is a little lighter now that the finish is off?

Next it was time to cut the hole for the sink. Since we were going with an undermount sink, we weren't sure if we wanted to cut the hole since there was no room for a mistake. I called around to several cabinet shops to see what they would charge, all said around $300 not including formatting and sanding the hole. So needless to say, we did it ourselves.

I bought an undermount sink on clearance for $60, originally $290 so that was a great deal. But I wanted to double check just to make sure the template that was included in the clearance sink was the correct one, well it wasn't. So we just put the sink on the underside of the countertop and made our own template first tracing the outside of the sink and the tracing the inside of the sink by sticking our hands through the drain hole. Make sure you look under your cabinets to measure where the sink should go and don't go off of your old countertops. We had some wood pieces inside our cabinets we wouldn't have know about if we had not looked, also if we had gotten the cabinet shop to cut the hole, they would have cut it wrong since the wouldn't have measured off of our cabinets.

Measure then check your measurements. Repeat about 5 times until your paranoid husband is happy and your dog gives you the side eye.

After we got the sink drawn off where we wanted it, it was time to cut. Eric used a circular saw to cut the straight parts and a jigsaw to cut the rounded corners. We had known that it would be a pretty rough cut job with the jigsaw so I bought Eric a belt sander for our "anniversary" to sand the sink hole with. A belt sander is a must have for this project. It was only $70, which is still a lot cheaper than the $300 (our lowest quote) for someone else to cut the hole. He used the belt sander to smooth everything out and then finished it up hand sanding with 220 grit sandpaper. I was so excited, I guess I didn't take pictures.

After the sink hole was cut and smoothed out, I went over the countertops with a tack cloth to get all of the additional dust off. The I applied a wood conditioner. This is a very important step, as it will help the stain have an even appearance with all of the different cuts of the butcher block. After the wood conditioner dried, I went back over the countertop with 220 grit sandpaper to get all of the raised grain sanded off, and the used a tack cloth. Then it was time to stain. We used Minwax Special Walnut #224. I read to use an oil based stain, but we already had this so I took the risk. So far so good. I put on 2 coats of stain.

Continued here:
this & that: Countertops - blogspot.com