Making the Peninsula Trim – Part One

We’re making custom trim around the peninsula of our Ikea cabinets, and the goal was to make a trim that coordinated with the Lidingo doors. You can see a little mock up here at the end which we are going to run all along the back too. That end piece was just a test piece, so the final product will look more seamless.

I first thought about doing board and batten, but the plain squared edges of board and batten didn’t seem to go with the Lidingo doors at all. I think it would have looked mismatched. Then we thought about making raised panel wainscoting that would be almost identical to the raised panel Lidingo doors, but this would have been a long, time consuming project, so instead we went with a flat panel look. The rails and stiles have a decorative routed edge that I think ties in better to the Lidingo doors than a plain squared board and batten would.

So far we’ve gone from this.

To this.

We originally planned on getting the wood from Home Depot or Lowe’s, but after sampling some poplar and pine it was too soft. The area around the peninsula gets a lot of traffic and I didn’t want the corners and edges to get all beat up. I could easily scratch the softer wood with my fingernail, so I thought it would be better to go with a stronger wood like maple.

The big box stores by us don’t carry maple boards (I’m not sure if any do, but the ones by us don’t seem to), so a couple weeks ago I went to Vienna Hardwood with my dad to pick out some maple.They had lots of maple.  Phone pics, excuse the quality.

This is a neat store and they seem to carry just about every type of wood you can imagine from the basics to exotics.

My dad is handy with woodworking and offered to help with making the trim. It was fun for me because I haven’t ever done something like this before so I got to see how all of the tools worked.

If some of these tools like like antique versions of ones you see today, well that’s because they are. Well, maybe not antique, but they’ve been around awhile. The table saw and band saw were my grandfather’s and are very old. My dad remembered my grandfather having these tools when he was young and my first thought was they had, like, power tools back then? Ha. Apparently so.

First step was to cut the large boards down to length with the compound miter saw (could use a table saw too). We made them a little long at first.

Then cut to width with the band saw (cut a little wide)

Run along the jointer to make sure they are nice and straight.

 

Cut exactly to the right width using the table saw.

Split piece down the middle with the band saw.

Use the thickness planer to smooth out the pieces and make exactly the same thickness.

We drew up a plan to figure out the measurements for the length of the rails and stiles.

The stiles (vertical pieces) will be covered by baseboards at the bottom, so they didn’t need to be precisely the same height, just tall enough to be covered by the baseboard. We used the compound miter saw to cut the stiles. (I helped a bit!)

We used the table saw to get the rails (horizontal pieces) all exactly the right length.

Cope the ends using a router.

Route the edges.

Voila!

Next up will be giving these a light sanding, attaching these to the peninsula panel, priming, and painting.

Update: Continue to Part 2: Making of the Peninsula Trim (All Finished!)

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