Less than a week until Christmas — time to finish those kitchen cabinets! I made a countertop from two pieces of basswood.

I used a utility knife to cut a rough hole for the sink.

Then I enlarged this carefully until it was just larger than the sink. A tad too large, actually, but once the countertop is finished those cracks between the sink sides and the edges of the countertop are hardly visible.

Next I glued the two pieces together, but not onto the cabinets yet.

When the glue was dry, I sanded the top (especially the seam where the two pieces meet) and rounded the edges a bit.

I painted it with a base coat of Christmas-y green.

Then I used a dry brush with black and various shades of green for a granite effect. The process is described in more detail here.

Once the paint dried I coated the countertop with gloss varnish, and once that was dry I glued it to the cabinets. Shakespeare comes in handy again!

Next up: a kitchen island. I ordered a gingerbread prep table off Etsy and asked the seller not to glue on the items, just in case the table didn’t work with my layout. It’s a good thing, because the table is way too big.

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The ink cartridge I was waiting for finally came in the mail, so I was able to move forward on the breadbox interior. The first step was staining the floor. This is a Houseworks flooring sheets that I got in a Freecycle haul this summer. I stained it with Minwax English Oak.

When the stain was (mostly) dry, I glued it in and weighed it down with heavy books. (I always knew Shakespeare would come in handy!) I put down a piece of wax paper since the stain was still a little tacky.

Meanwhile, I glued wooden spacers to the back of the foamcore I’d cut to make a false back wall. The casement window extends 1/4″ from the back of the foamcore so I used 1/4″ wood to make the spacers. (The square window is not quite as deep as the casement window.)

So here’s why I needed the ink cartridge — to print out a winter scene for behind the windows. This is a photo of the view out my parents’ front door after a snowstorm. My dad sent me a bunch of pictures and initially I wanted to use two different ones, but since the windows are next to each other, they had to be similar (same scale, road running through in the same place, etc.) It turned out to be easier to use one photo big enough that I could grab a portion for each window.

I printed out two copies and messed around with the windows until I liked the placement.

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