Our week-lengthy Thrifty Birthday Bash keeps with a observe some exciting and ecofrugal items I obtained this yr.
My gift this 12 months from Brian end up made in particular through request. I'd grown bored to death with the knife drawer in our kitchen, which, till approximately according to week in the beyond, seemed like this:
We had about ten knives in there, maximum of which we failed to even use regularly, and they were all definitely floating spherical unfastened. To maintain from reducing ourselves, we'd sheathed all of the blades in little cardboard covers, but that without a doubt made it harder to tell them apart via searching. I become tired of having to rummage around in there for 2 minutes just to find out the handiest software knife that I clearly use.
The most obvious answer could be to transfer all of the knives from the drawer to a knife block, but I did now not want to do that for severa reasons. First, and most significantly, it would absorb counter space, which our kitchen has little enough of as it is. Also, maximum knife blocks are designed to house a elegant set of knives, which is not in any respect what we've. Our motley assortment, shown underneath, blanketed three chef's knives, three paring knives, utility knives, and one play around-bow bread knife that could now not in form into any knife block and could for this reason have to stay in a drawer regardless of what.
So I asked Brian for a custom-made knife insert, designed especially for our drawer, that might accommodate all of the knives we have got and make them easy to find out at a look. And Brian not simplest gave me without a doubt that, he went one better through building the whole lot entirely out of substances we had handy. He began out with a simple block of strong wood, salvaged from our scrap pile and cut to fit the drawer. Then he cut slits in it lengthy sufficient and deep sufficient to residence the blades of our biggest knives. He wavered over the spacing of the slits; he may want to accommodate greater knives altogether through making some of the slots nearer together, but that would constrain us to hold precise knives in precise slots (the huge ones inside the greater appreciably spaced slots, the smaller ones within the narrower ones). Eventually he determined that, due to the fact we did not have that many knives, he may additionally need to virtually make all of them a uniform distance aside, allowing us to preserve any knife in any slot.
The block with the slits became, with the aid of itself, all we needed to preserve the knife blades, but something needed to hold the block itself in region. So Brian delivered a 2nd, flatter piece of scrap timber to the the front of the block, that could hold it toward the bottom of the drawer by using manner of friction. He secured the 2 portions together with some more-prolonged screws, salvaged from the set of futon hardware we ordered for our outside-sale futon that ended up being the incorrect kind.
To connect the two portions together, he first drilled holes via the main block from above. Then he laid the quantities out component via aspect, as they might match into the drawer, and clamped them collectively in order that he should drill an extended hole that would bypass all of the manner thru the block and into the lowest piece.
As you could see within the image, he moreover introduced a in addition
You may also notice from this picture that Brian left a gap at the side of the drawer for the fiddle-bow bread knife, which has its blade mounted sideways and can't go into a normal knife slot. And to keep this knife on a level with all the other ones, he added yet another narrow strip of scrap wood to the side for the bread knife to sit on. This one is secured to the slitted block with a couple of regular-length wood screws, screwed in horizontally (across the width of the piece). It also serves to extend that side of the knife insert the whole length of the drawer, so it doesn't slide back and forth too much when you open or shut the drawer. There's still a millimeter or two of wiggle room, but for the most part, the whole thing stays in place.
So now, with the drawer insert in place, all our knives line up neatly:
We pared down the collection just a little bit to fit them all in. We started with not two, but three chef's knives—a very nice Sabatier that we inherited from my grandmother, an older and cheaper one from Chicago Cutlery that Brian uses most of the time because he's used to it, and a still cheaper third one with a plastic handle that we got from we couldn't even remember where. Since we never used it and we already had a spare, we figured there was no need to hold on to it—so we listed it on Freecycle, where it quickly found a good home. We did keep all the paring knives, even though the insert could only accommodate two of them; there was a little bit of room left at the end of the drawer, so we just stuck the extra paring knife in there with its cardboard sheath still on. We know where to find it if we ever need it, and if we don't, it can always join its friend on Freecycle.
Wood from our scrap pile: free.
Hardware left over from the futon: free.
Being able to find any knife I want in the drawer at a glance: priceless.
