How to: Build your own butcher block!

Moving on to the fourth post ever at Grandma’s house DIY from back in September of 2015. How I built the butcher block for our island. I was pretty excited to tackle this project actually. I was fortunate to have all the lovely oak I needed and I really felt like I had a good plan. My red kitchen island needed a top and butcher block was absolutely the only thing I wanted. It turned out to be VERY doable and a fun project. I was really proud with how it turned out!

Its pretty amazing to read back and realize how much has changed here at Grandma’s house! Here is the original post:

I found that to build your own butcher block is not all that complicated! With the wonderful resource of our barn to pull from (my grandparents’ old wood working shop) I just keep finding more and more material to work with.

In this case I knew several years ago exactly what I planned on using for the butcher block on my island – I didn’t yet have an island in mind but that wasn’t the point!

To see the finished island check it out here: A radio stand converted into a red kitchen island.

Building it took some time but was extremely easy. Most of the time people do not add brad nails (or any type of nails) to a butcher block, instead they either use biscuits or nothing at all.

I wasn’t comfortable with that and did’t have the tools to do biscuits so I went ahead and put a couple of brads in every board along with the glue. I put two 2x4s down for a flat surface, over a drop cloth in the middle of my kitchen.

I took another 2×4 and used that as a flat edge to butt all of the boards up to so that I would remain as straight and flush as possible.

Because my material is a very odd choice for butcher block I knew this would be a rather “unconventional” butcher block counter top.

However, I think it turned out nice and I didn’t have to cut anything down, I just used the length of the boards that I had on hand. (Why my grandpa had literally a pallet’s worth of these little pine boards in the barn I have no idea, I’m darned curious if he had some kind of plan for them). 

Once everything was nailed and glued together I took my two long clamps and clamped it as hard as I possibly could.

I also had to do a little pounding on the whole thing to get it more straight as I didn’t do the best of jobs in making a perfect rectangle, however, the hammering on it worked and the whole thing turned out better then I thought it would.

I left it clamped for over a day and then put it on top of my newly finished island (A radio stand converted into a red kitchen island) and attached it with a few brad nails from the underside.

It’s not going anywhere.