A long time ago, back when no one read my blog, I posted about the kitchen we redid at our old house just before we sold it.

We painted the cabinets black (I actually did this with the help of my realtor and some friends while Dave took all the kids to California to visit family) and changed out the hardware, put up that backsplash, and replaced the original 80’s laminate counter tops with Ikea Numerar butcher block (and then we took pictures of it all at night, with a flash. Wince). We paid a guy to put it in for us, which was way more expensive than the counters themselves. I think if we were doing it now, we’d give it a try ourselves.

I loved my new counters, but I never really got to enjoy them. We weren’t there for long after they went in, and, while we were still there, I was so paranoid about scratching or staining them that I did all the food prep on the table and spent most of my time obsessively keeping stray drops of water off the counters and coating them with yet another layer of mineral oil. The granite we have now is more practical, but I still love the look of the butcher block and wish we’d put them in years earlier so we could have lived with them longer.

There were a couple of good sized scrap pieces of butcher block left over, so the guy who installed the counters cut them up into more manageable pieces and saved them for me to make cutting boards from. And now, two years later, that’s exactly what I’ve done!

The pieces were still bigger than we wanted, so Dave took one of them over to a friend’s house to use his table saw to chop it into a more manageable size (you could do this with a skil saw, but it would be harder to get a straight line. That is the sum total of what I know about skil saws vs. table saws. Also that it’s easier to cut your finger off with a table saw). The piece we ended up with is about 14″ by 19″.

 

The Numerar counters are already sanded very smooth, but we had a rough edge where we made the cut, so Dave sanded it down in our messy garage:

 

Then I put a coat of “wood preservative” on it:

 

“Wood Preservative” in this case is mineral oil. I’m pretty sure that’s all that’s in this bottle (we’ve had it for years). Basically you need some kind of food safe oil to use that won’t turn rancid, and mineral oil is a cheap and readily available option (I read that coconut oil will work, too).

Then we attached these little rubber feet to keep it from sliding or scratching anything:

 

I got them on Amazon for around $7 including shipping, but shipping was most of that…you probably could pick them up cheaper at Home Depot or Lowe’s, but you’ll have to leave your house for that.

Dave drilled pilot holes and then used an electric screwdriver to attach them:

 

 

And then I rubbed a couple more coats of the mineral oil in. The oil protects the wood and also darkens it to a nice, kind of reddish tone (I think these were the birch Numerars, but I’m not sure). I’ve read that a beeswax finish is not a bad thing for a cutting board, so I might do that, too.

Now it looks like this!

 

I’m planning to keep it permanently on the island and just wipe it down every time I use it. I thought about styling it all pretty for the pictures, but then I hit up against the limitations of my styling abilities when “stack of books” is not an appropriate accessory.

Aborted attempt at styling:

 

“Umm….maybe a pitcher?” No.

I realize most of you probably don’t have Numerar counter top scraps sitting in your garage and that this tutorial will be useless to you. I actually started to calculate how much it would cost per cutting board to buy a counter top specifically to chop into cutting boards (for Christmas presents?), but then I stopped because I thought probably no one would do that. My preliminary inexact estimates suggested somewhere in the $25-30 range, though, which is going to pretty much kick the crap out of, say, Williams Sonoma prices for a cutting board this size. And, of course, if you happen to have a bunch of extra butcher block sitting around already, it’s a no brainer.

post contains an affiliate link

Sharing with:

Link Party Palooza