Knife Block

Knife try!

First things first, the bathroom remodel is done. I finished it last night, but I need daylight to get decent pictures. I'll send out a special post in the next day or two as soon as I can get pics. In the meantime, here's a little something I made for our kitchen a couple years ago.

I had some kitchen knives and a knife block from years ago. When we decided to add a few more knives to it, I realized the knives had outgrown the capacity of the block. Time to make a knife block.

I'm going to skip the long explanation and just say that I didn't want a top-insert style knife block like what we had, similar to this:

Source: https://www.usnews.com/360-reviews/home-goods/best-knife-sets

Our knife block needs to sit back underneath top cupboards, so it's annoying to try to wrangle knives in and out of the block without banging knuckles or stabbing something. Instead, I wanted something with more of a lower angle front-load style. After looking around at lots of ideas, I started working up some initial design concepts.

Admittedly, it took some time to work through several concepts before I finally landed on an acceptable combination of aesthetic, functionality, and feasibility.

A few challenges I had to overcome were:

1. Quantity: it had to hold at least twelve knives, which is more than most knife blocks I found in my "research." I also still wanted it to be as compact as possible.

2. Scissors: I wanted it to hold our kitchen shears. I probably should have just bought the little shears holster from Cutco for $5, but honestly, I didn't think of that until...now.

3. Stability: I didn't want there to be a high risk of knives falling out of slots or of getting poked or sliced. That might sound silly, but some knife blocks are less conservative than others. Some of those are really nice designs, but we needed one that's safe and secure.

For example, this might be a perfect solution for some people, but I needed something with no exposed pokey bits.

Source: https://www.etsy.com/listing/788268075/wood-knife-rack-wall-mount-knife-holder

So, here's what I came up with.

Originally, the auxiliary block was going to be attached to the larger block, but I didn't like how that crowded the handles of the auxiliary pieces, so I just left it unattached and it seems to work fine.

The main block is Black Walnut with a Black Cherry piece down the center. The smaller block is Maple with a thin Black Cherry piece on the one side, and it holds the peeler, shears, and serving fork.

It's a lovely collection of angles that makes it feel related to our toilet paper bar. The left side of the block is for wide blades, and the right side is for narrower blades, which allowed me to make it as compact as possible. It has been serving us well for a couple years now, so that's knife.