Video Transcript
It’s a glorious day here at Cabinet Joint. I’m Justin, and in today’s video we are going to be talking about how to install wooden countertops and desktops. Now, this video basically covers all of your countertop types except different types of stones. This doesn’t cover marble or granite, but it does cover and will apply to things like if you have a hardwood butcher block top, if you have just a plywood edge-banded top, if you have something like Corian or a laminated Formica top, anything with wood or wood interiors, this video is going to help you out. In terms of what we offer, we offer 1" thick hardwood tops available in any of our wood species, as well as any of our finishes and any of our edge profiles. So, if you want to match a cabinet, you can do that. If you want to match something else in your room, maybe your island cabinets. If you don’t want to do 1" thick, you could also do ¾" thick. Same thing—all of our wood species, all of the edge profiles, and all of the finish options. If you want to go a more budget-friendly route, you can just use ¾" plywood with an edge band, and we can match all the finishes as well. So, those are what we offer. It can be done in any size, any shape. Just let us know. This is a really popular option for, in this case, an office. I see it lots of times with media centers and sometimes islands as well, just getting a butcher block or a wooden top. So, first, have all of these cabinets set and level.
You want to make sure that this has already been accomplished before you go to set the countertop on. These are already screwed into the wall. These are already fastened. It’s going to be a lot harder later on to do this. In fact, I’d say it’s impossible to accomplish this after your countertop is on. So, make sure everything is set. Make sure the bones are good. And then from there, assuming you are purchasing a countertop from us, we supply wooden, and we could also do plywood if you want, but hardwoods. What you’re going to see here is a painted maple. In this situation, it’s between two walls, so it’s going to be oversized. That way, we can cut it down to make it fit our space. But if it’s for your island, it won’t come oversized. It’ll be cut perfectly, and we can figure out those dimensions for you. You want to make sure that all the overhang is even all the way around your island, versus here we are going to have to cut it to size because we don’t have that overhang on the sides and on the back. Obviously, we are capable of making any shape. You’re about to see this is a bit of a different size shape because we have this desk bump-out here. We’re capable of making it and cutting it perfectly to whatever your needs are.
Installation is pretty easy. Move this level out of the way, and you’ll see I have these little spacer blocks. These are 1" spacing blocks. And what these are for is on top of your base cabinets, you either have these stretchers or this is a solid top. You are going to end up screwing in from underneath the cabinet. And if you don’t have these, it’ll just want to pull that plywood up to the countertop. But if you use these spacers, it’ll keep that distance equal and you don’t have to worry about the top of your base cabinet trying to pull up and damage it in any sort of way. With all that being said, I’m going to bring a helper in and we are going to take our measurements and cut our desktop to fit. Let’s get into it.
Our top is installed now, and what that process looked like: taking our measurements, and I was first going to see if everything was square. I used my laser measure, but you can just use a normal tape measure, and I found that the back wall where this is going to land was ¼" longer than the front. So, what that told me is somewhere along the lines, the room is out of square. I found that it was this back corner that needed to be extended then. So, we cut it at that angle. But before we got there, I took my measurements, and because this has this shaped cutout, I needed to make sure everything stayed central. So, I took my measurements, figured out what side it was going to be on, and then I took my measurements over to the top itself. And we had our top laying over on the pallet, still on top of the cardboard, measuring from the center, meaning on either side I took the same off. I took painter’s tape on the edge, put the tape on. The reason being, as we cut, the tape helps from chipping out, as well as it also creates just an easier visual for us to see. So I taped it, and then that’s when I took the measurements and marked them.
Now, I marked the right side square because this panel here is dead square. And then on this, I cut it at a taper because that wall was just a little tweaked. So, I used a track saw and I cut it at a 15° angle. The reason I cut it at an angle was it’ll make installation a lot easier. You’ll see a little gap here on your edge where that was cut at an angle. But if we didn’t do that, the installation would be a lot harder because we are putting a tight-fitting 8 ft plus long piece of wood. We want that to be tight. And if it’s not cut at that angle, it’s going to be really hard to get that to sit in without scratching up these panels. You don’t have to, but I highly recommend it. But if you have drywall or something that’s easily patchable, go ahead and do that. But we have prepainted panels that we don’t want to have to touch up. So I used a track saw to cut. But you could also use just your normal circular saw. If you’re really confident, you can just freehand it. But I would recommend using a level or some straight edge, clamping it to the top, and then using that as a guide for your circular saw. That way you guarantee that you get a nice straight cut.
Once we had it cut, the original plan was to bring it in here and test fit it and then bring it back out and then record putting it in. But first try, we cut it so tight that we weren’t able to take it back out. And so then the test became the final, and we don’t have video of that. But just believe me, we brought it in knowing myself. We brought it in and we put it at an angle and then just slowly let it sit down, and we didn’t scratch up the sides at all. And that’s why cutting it at an angle makes life a lot easier.
And from there, I went and checked my overhang all the way around to make sure it was even, at least close to even. You won’t notice a ¹⁄₁₆" difference here on the front. So, I made sure everything was good, which it was. And then our sides are tight, and our back is going to have cabinets on top of it, so we don’t need to worry and make sure that is extremely tight. If we were concerned about that, we could go ahead and scribe the back along the wall. And we have an entire video dedicated to scribing, and you can watch that video for reference on how you would go about doing that.
But we liked the fit. We liked where it sat. And then I went and put 2" screws through the top of my base cabinet into the desktop, doing so where we put those spacers. That way, once again, the top of our base cabinet doesn’t try to just flex up, but instead it holds it there—holds everything nice, firm, and stiff.
And now we have this beautiful countertop installed. With the countertop installed, I want to remind you that this video only works with countertops that have some sort of wooden substrate that you can screw into. It does not include your granite, does not include your marble, things like that. You can reach out to your cabinet coach or call us at 888-211-6482. Thank you guys for watching. Have a great day.
