DIY Budget outdoor kitchen build part 2! Blackstone area! #Vevor #616

So welcome back, everybody. My name's Andrew, and you're watching the Kelly's Country Life. If this is your first time visiting the channel, we appreciate you stopping by. Consider subscribing. We post weekly videos like this. So we're back on part two of the DIY kitchen build here, and we're trying to do this on a budget. Definitely don't want to break the bank. We just got done building this house. That was enough of a financial hit for us. So in today's episode, we are going to notch out and build this entire dropdown area for our blackstone. I'm about to show you the measurements and what we have to take into consideration there to build a blackstone into a bar top like this. We're going to finish doing all the vertical supports on this back wall so we can sheathe it. And we may get into doing our bottom shelving in this episode as well. So a lot more framing and finishing things up. Let me show you this blackstone and what we got to take into consideration. So this is our 36-inch blackstone. And if you're not a stranger to the channel, you see us use this all the time, especially every single Sunday on our live streams. We always wind up cooking on it, but we use this thing multiple times a week. And this is going to be our main cooking appliance built into that bar top. Now, the cool thing is you can take this whole top section off so I can remove the legs. I can remove these side panels and the handles. And it just so happens I'm working with about 37 inches, but we have to take something into consideration. These vents right here let a lot of heat out. Plus not to mention, this is the bottom side of the blackstone that's going to be sitting on that dropdown that we're building. And it has this big open area right here. You have to allow air in to feed the burners as well as really you're exhausting a lot of air out. It comes out underneath the blackstone top itself, as well as these vents here. And there's multiple vents all along the back. Plus we have a drip tray for our grease. So long story short, because we're not going to elevate the blackstone up above the countertop, because that would have you cooking up here, we're building that dropdown area to get it back to a comfortable working height. But I have to take in consideration all these vents around this that are going to be just pumping the heat out. So I can't build my countertop sides of that dropdown area right up next to the blackstone. You could, but you may run into some serious problems there. It's just too much heat being put on the countertop surface itself. So I want to leave a relatively large gap all the way around this to allow that to vent up and out. So I have vertical supports here and here. I think what I'm going to do is just cut this top section out and we're going to build all the way up to that It's a little wider than I need, like a half inch wider. Think it'd be a good width to work with. Plus I'd rather go too big than too small in case we ever want to upsize or change out down the road. We've got the space to do that and build back closed. So I do want to take a moment and mention this project sponsor, a company called Vivor. They literally carry anything you could possibly want for an outdoor kitchen, for your home, for a shop, from tools, you name it. They donated all the door and drawer sets here that you're seeing for this particular build. All made of 304 stainless steel, very affordable. I will have links down in the description if you're interested in any of these products. A huge thank you again to Vivor for helping sponsor this build. Okay, well, I've got everything done. As you can see, well, I kind of made a couple of mistakes, put the studs on the wrong side. Instead of ripping everything out, I scabbed some corner bracing in here. That's why some of this stuff looks a little odd. Oh, well, it's just a little more overbuilt now. But what I was talking about earlier and what's critical, everywhere you have a corner, whether it be right here or here, because I'm laying sheathing in 3 1⁄4 inch plywood that's gonna meet in all these sections. That's what I'm gonna tile to, both vertically and horizontally. But anywhere you meet a corner, this is just like whenever you lay sheetrock in a house. I like to have full wooden support there to screw in my edges, because the edge is gonna be the weakest part of plywood or drywall, for example, and give. So I've worked extra hard here to make for sure that I can screw into at least a stud vertically and then have lips horizontally to screw down into. I just wanna get some really good bracing for my plywood. And then that's going to brace my cement board, tile backer board very well, and then ultimately the tile. It's just gonna make my tile job that much better. So the last area that I really need to focus on, this is too big of an opening. Even though I'm gonna lay plywood across this, it would have too much give in the middle. So every so often I wanna run some supports just like I did right here to really give us some support to that plywood that's going down. And like I said, it's just gonna make my tile job better. So that's what I'm about to work on right now. A few more supports around this way and we're done. Then we can pull all of the doors and drawers out because I already have them completely boxed in and we can start sheathing all of this. All right, so here's one of those situations that I always encourage people to do or to try. And let me tell you, it has probably saved me well into the six figures doing things myself, finding ways to save money, building this house over the last year. By the way, I'm about to release a full cost breakdown on the house. It's a lot of people watch the house building series and I'll kind of give you an idea of what we spent to build everything that you're seeing, including this outdoor kitchen. So I was in Lowe's the other day. I need two by twos, which is just your little squared off lumber, just stick lumber. Cause this is what I was gonna screw around on the inside and make a lip all the way around and then drop my shelf down on top. Well, the two by lumber was like almost $6 for one little piece, just outrageous. So here's the thing. I could actually buy a two by four cheaper than a little two by two. And just by bringing my table saw out here and spending just a few minutes, every time I cut a two by four, I'm getting basically a free two by two. There's $5 in my pocket. And just, I mean, literally probably five minutes, I'm gonna spend more time talking than cutting. I'm probably gonna put about 20 bucks in my pocket. So things like that have saved me a ton of money. I can remember one situation where I was working on the house. Trim's been outrageous, thanks to COVID and lumber being through the roof. And I built my own quarter round trim. I think I had an hour to two hours in it. I can't remember the figures exactly, but I had tallied it all up. And I think it was like 75 to $100 an hour. I paid myself or saved building my own trim. And it took me like two hours, but $100 an hour, that's good money. That's more money in my pocket, and more money I can invest elsewhere on a project. So don't hesitate to do little odd things like this yourself. It saved me a ton of money along the way. All right, so what was that? 30 seconds. And I have two very robust shelf supports right here. Cut a few more of these, good to go. All right, so a lot of y'all have seen me use this on the channel before, but it's called the Craig Rip Cut. And this literally just clamps onto the front of any circular saw with two screws here. And it's got a fully adjustable track right here to rip plywood up to in half, so 24 inches. And you can slide this track up and down. But this piece right here is designed to run on a straight edge of plywood. You adjust this out to the length that you need to rip down. So it basically turns your circulating saw into a table saw. Now here's the thing, I have a table saw right there, but lifting up three quarter inch pressure treated plywood by myself, this stuff's extremely heavy. It's not happening. I'm not gonna be able to carry it over there and conveniently rip it down on the table saw. So this thing is really nice for long straight cuts, just like this. And just like that, I have a perfectly straight cut all the way down this eight foot piece of plywood. And the beauty is I didn't have to do measurements. I didn't have to go get a straight edge out and try to draw a line and then try to follow it, leaning all the way across the table. Just grab a hold of this, run with it. I love that tool. If you're ever looking for something for somebody for like a little Christmas gift, birthday gift, everybody should have that in their shop. I don't care if you've got a table saw or not, because there's certain situations that table saw, like I said today, just isn't gonna help me. All right, so you can see that we decided to go with a grooved paneling. This is called a four inch on center paneling. And the reason we went with this, because it kind of mimics the look of the house, but not exactly. We wanted it to look a little different. We considered doing hardy on this. And if we carried it out here looking just like the house, we just kind of felt like it was gonna stand out and not look quite right. We wanted it to be similar, but a little different, if that makes sense. Now we're also going with a non-pressure treated paneling because, well, let's face it, nobody out there makes a grooved pressure treat paneling. And again, I'm highly concerned about plywood and paneling in the pressure treat form. It tends to dry warp, can delaminate, just kind of does whatever the heck it wants to. I'm not a big fan of it. Once we get a good coat or two of paint on this, I'm not concerned at all. You gotta keep in mind all the wood out here on the porch, everything you're looking at other than the poles is non-pressure treated wood as well. As long as you paint it, it's good. I actually have a big deer blind that's been sitting out for a few years now in the woods with paneling similar to this, with a good coat of paint on it. No rot, no issues, and it's been out there through every storm, tropical storms, hurricanes, everything you can think of. It gets wet all the time. So you really wanna seal the wood good and do multiple coats of paint. We're not gonna have a problem underneath here. Now to put all this on, I am using my siding nailer, my Bostik siding nailer. It's a coil nailer. It shoots a small 2 1⁄2 inch ring shank galvanized nail. Boy, when they go in, they stay in. Actually, this is the same gun I use to put all this hardy trim on the house. It'll be perfect for this. And I've set the air pressure up on this to overdrive the nail just a little because I wanna come back and fill all the nail holes with some wood putty, quickly sand them down with my orbital sander, and then paint all this. That way you don't see any nail heads, nothing. I just ripped me down some 1⁄2 inch wood spacers that I have on the ground. Again, we wanna space this panel in the 1⁄2 inch off the ground so air can get underneath because water's gonna make its way underneath there between pressure washing and rain. And I want it to be able to flow in and out and air to get under there to drive this. So one thing worth mentioning with paneling, especially thin paneling like this, it tends to wanna warp and bow on you. That's just kind of the way it is. So I always start on one end and try to work down the paneling that works the bow itself out. If you just kind of tend to go nail, nailing blindly all around the edges, next thing you know, you have paneling that could be sitting on here bowed out like this. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and trim my paneling out, and then I can actually put a square up here and start shooting the lines down. I'll show you that in just a second. Now to trim my paneling, I bought this little bit. It's got a tip on the end that'll drive right through this stuff if you need to cut out, say, a window or an opening like we're gonna do in a little bit later. And then it's got a cutting blade right here on the very edge. This is called a panel bit. Now you'll find that due to the design of the router, you can't cut all the way through on stuff like this because the router's hitting the concrete or it's hitting the side of the wall. So you're left with two, three inches to cut. You can use a handsaw or one of my favorite tools, the oscillating tool here. And these cuts don't have to be perfect because we're capping the ends with trim. So here's what makes things nice and easy. I have a stud right in here on the inside. At least I'm gonna keep calling it a stud. Right here, here, you can see them all the way down. You can see I have nail holes in the top, so now I already know where these are. So since I waited to nail all this out here, minus a couple nails to again take that bow out of it, I wanted to trim this off first because now I can just come back with my square and draw a line straight up and down to where these nail holes are. Now I know right where all the studs are. I can knock this out really quickly. All right, it's been a heck of a long day. I think this is where we're gonna knock this episode off. Made really good progress. So we've got our Blackstone area completely notched out and ready to go. All the sheathing's done, the countertop bracing, everything's ready to go. Bottom shelves too, completely forgot about them. So that was a lot of good progress. So what we're gonna do in the next episode is go ahead and get the plywood on for the countertops. Basically just start prepping everything for the countertops and we may go ahead and install those in the next episode as well. I'll see how long that time's out. As well as we'll have to go ahead and set up our bar top. And ultimately, like I said, we're putting all the sheathing down for us to come right behind the 3 1⁄4 inch plywood and then put 1⁄2 inch tile backer board, basically it's like a concrete board material on top of that. So we're making an extremely rigid countertop for this tile to sit on. So we should hopefully never have any issues with grout lines or the tile itself cracking. To all my daily viewers that constantly watch the videos as they come out, thank you and just wanna let you know, it's probably gonna be at least another week before we get part three out on the outdoor kitchen build. We have a lot going on, got a lot of mowing to do, property stuff and a few errands to run. So that's really gonna eat into my work time here. And then I'm gonna have to work on this for a couple of days, edit you a video, upload it and then get it out. So all that does take time, but we're making really good progress. I'm excited to see this thing done. Today was just another big step forward. Thank y'all so much for watching. We'll catch you on the next video.