“The grandkids are coming in August. I think you should build them a play kitchen,” Anne said to me a few weeks ago. ”Now, what does this have to do with Ten Centuries?” you ask. Well, the basic Ten Centuries philosophy is that life is more fun if you do stuff. That even includes building a play kitchen from scratch.

I decided to make three pieces: a stove, a sink and a refrigerator. But where to start? Going to the internet, I looked up play kitchen plans and was astonished to see that the plans showed the stove and sink base to be 18-22 inches tall. I grabbed a tape and measured 20 inches from the floor, “That is tiny,” I thought, “it must be a mistake.” But before making them bigger I called my daughter, Marion, the proud mother of a 3 ½ year old. “Monette is only 36 inches tall,” she replied, “20 inches is past her waist.” I forget just how little a little person is.

Having a general idea of how I wanted the kitchen to look and the basic dimensions, I began where I always start my projects: making the wood.

To have boards you must first grow an oak tree. When we built our summer house we cut down many trees. Among them were a few large oak and ash. We took them to a saw mill and had them rough sawn into 1” boards. The boards range in width from 2” to 8” and are not flat, square or smooth. The kitchen needed panels 16” wide so, as noted, my first job was to make the wood.

I ran the rough sawn boards through the jointner on one side to make them perfectly straight then through the table saw to make the other side parallel and finally glued them together using biscuits. After the glue set, I planed them into ½ inch panels and cut them to size.

I won’t go into all the details of the actual construction, but making and acquiring some of the parts was fun. The “stove burners” are disks made by cutting the ½ inch panel material with a 6” hole saw. Making the knobs involved using a dado set to make a board with a ridge down the middle and then cutting out the knobs with a 2” hole saw. I got the faucet for free from a local plumbing contractor who had removed it when installing a new one. The sink is a 10” stainless bowl. Anne made the curtain for the sink base.

So the grandkids have a solid oak (from trees grown on the property) play kitchen that cost the price of a few hinges, a stainless bowl and some paint, maybe $30 dollars all told. I have a pleasant memory and a happy wife. Life is good.