Grandpa Genes

Mara and I both have carpentry in our blood. Grandpa Bacon whittled and made awesome carvings and a bookshelf we still use. Grandpa Hansen made amazing cabinets,and he's made a rocking chair for each great-grandchild . Grandpa Syring made about 1000 letter holders and gave them to about everyone he knew.
Now Mara and I don't have the practice, nor the patience, that our Grandfathers had. Nor do we have the tools they had. We probably don't have the design skills they possess. And our workbench has been downgraded to a fold out card table. Pretty crappy, I know.
I was looking through a magazine and saw a picture of a neat butcher block. The idea was pretty much a box with enough bamboo sticks to support knives




Now we don't have $125 to spend on a "European pine" and bamboo block of wood, so we decided to put our genes to the test....















We went to Home Depot and found a REALLY cool scrap piece of poplar wood for about $3. We then bought enough L brackets to frame a house, and a small can of polyurethane.
The brackets we got were a little shorter than we needed, so Mara came up with an AWESOME design that really looks slick. By overlapping the wood on one end we could use the brackets and still have a solid perimeter:








The outside of the block with Mara's design of joining the wood with alternating colors.



















This block could survive a nuke...











Next we needed enough skewers to fill the damn thing. The dollar store yielded nothing but a 6' dog leash for Linus, and a trip to Wal-Mart gave us 200 sticks; about enough to fill 1/5 of the block. Hy-Vee yielded the rest of the roughly 1000 bamboo skewers it took to fill the block enough to support our heavy knives.
Here is our final product...

This was the test knife. A 7" Santoku knife that is about the heaviest we own.

And then we added the rest of our knives...

We were REALLY happy with the way it turned out. I knew we had those genes for a reason!

My fingers are a little sore from breaking all of those bamboo skewers. I sliced myself pretty good with one.

So 1 trip to Home Depot's scrap yard, 12 L brackets, 1000 bamboo skewers, and 1 band-aid later, we have a new home for our favorite kitchen utensils!