Do it herself

So besides the bathroom demo, I also started on a kitchen project. I've talked before about the stupid built in cutting board in the kitchen. It is seriously, the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Why, oh why, would you build a cutting board into the counter and not seal it to the counter or seal the wood underneath? That is just asking for a nasty, super germ incubating ground! Because we are having to replace the bathroom instead, I've decided to at least do my best to make sure the problem doesn't get an worse.

This is what the wood looked like when I started

Notice the black spots? Yeah, that was rotten wood. I don't know if you can tell it from the picture but there are bits of loose wood and food all over this thing. I started by wiping it off with bleach, then ran the vacuum cleaner over it get all the pieces. As I was running the vacuum over it, it was pulling off more chunks of wood from those black parts. Now, my vacuum is pretty good but it ain't that good! I grabbed my scissors and starting scraping at the wood and watched it basically crumble under my touch. I eventually scraped off most of the really rotten wood and filled in the gaps with wood glue.

As you can see, that is no small area that the glue was required to fill! Of course, with that much glue, it takes some time to dry. It has been drying for over 24 hours and looks like it will take another day, at least. Once it is dry, I'm going to sand it down smooth, then put poly on it, like I did the table. Once that is done, I'm going to get a new cutting board to cover it up (one that isn't yellowed and cut up from use). It won't be pretty but it will work and it will keep the damaged from getting any worse. This is a minor repair now but if the wood rotted all the way through, it would have been a huge pain in the neck to fix!

With both of these projects, I've done them almost completely by myself (MF "helped" me yesterday by handing me tools while I was on the ladder and both kids took a whack at breaking the drywall). RF was at work both days. With all the snow, he has pulled down a boat load of overtime. 13 hours yesterday and 4 today, which left me to do my worst on the house!