The smell of strong morning coffee fills the cozy kitchen. You want to be here all the time, inhaling the aromas of freshly cooked food - fried meat, mushroom soup, sweet freshly baked pastries. You want to meet here in the evening, for leisurely conversations after a day of work, spend the weekend doing pre-lunch chores for the family, or just sit when the family has already fallen asleep, with a cup of herbal tea. Yes, right here, behind this wooden kitchen countertop - warm, cozy, welcoming ... and, it seems, eternal.
Practicality or durability?
How to make a tabletop practical and durable? Both of these qualities are laid down initially, at the stage of choosing a wooden surface.
What to look for when choosing a wooden kitchen surface?
- You cannot use veneer, MDF, chipboard, only natural wood.
- It matters:
- age of wood;
- felling site;
- storage conditions.
- Products made from glued wood are more flexible and elastic than their solid wood counterparts.
- A properly selected coating will protect the wood in harsh kitchen conditions. Before covering a wooden countertop with oil or another suitable composition, it is worth studying the available range of coatings, their properties, and features. Even better, test the selected product on a small piece of wood.
- It is necessary to clearly define the methods of surface care and the possibility of restoration in case of damage.
A wooden countertop should be smooth, durable, resistant to moisture, temperature, and cuts. A product made from harder wood will last longer. Classic kitchen countertops are oak or beech. More affordable countertops are made from ash, pine, walnut, and birch.
Larch is a good choice. Its dense wood is resistant to mechanical destruction and deformation. The gum in larch wood prevents the growth of fungi and decay, such properties are ideal for difficult kitchen conditions. Larch has an important property of giving off or absorbing moisture when humidity conditions change.
Advantages of wooden surfaces over other types:
- environmental friendliness;
- beautiful texture;
- variety of colors, shades;
- ease of processing, unlimited possibilities in creating different shapes, neat edge with the possibility of various milling;
- ease of updating and repair.
Don't forget about the disadvantages:
- requires more careful maintenance than other types of surfaces
- periodic restoration is necessary;
- high cost of material, expensive work to process it.
In the case of wood, you need to remember that all the difficulties associated with its selection, maintenance, and repair will be more than compensated for by the coziness, beauty, and extraordinary feeling of comfort in the kitchen.
Oil, wax or varnish?
A high-quality coating made with good compounds will give the wooden tabletop a beautiful appearance and protect it from moisture and aggressive detergents.
How to cover a wooden tabletop so that it lasts as long as possible and remains beautiful?
- With oil, wax.
- Alkyd coatings.
- Water-dispersible compositions.
Ideally impregnated with oil, oil-wax. Oil, saturating the wood structure, gives it water-repellent properties. With high-quality treatment with good oil and wax, the tabletop becomes resistant to household chemicals, detergents, which are often used to wash kitchen utensils.
A special oil designed for impregnating wood that comes into contact with food will ensure environmentally friendly processing.
You can use colored glaze, stain, other water-dispersed coatings with subsequent application of varnish. The properties of the varnish used, its resistance to moisture, and the multi-layer coating are important.
A quality coating is applied in several layers – two or three – regardless of the paint and varnish composition. Do not mix alkyd and acrylic coatings. Before covering the countertop with the main composition, it is important to select the appropriate primer.
Advice!
For maximum durability, the coating should be renewed a year after its application. The product needs time to "get used" to the surface at different temperature conditions. When exposed to external conditions, microcracks appear on the surface of the coatings, which are visually indistinguishable. Therefore, it will be useful to lightly sand the top layer and apply a new layer with the same composition.
The quality of the coating can be tested in the following way: apply a few drops of water to the tabletop and observe how quickly they are absorbed. A good coating has excellent water-repellent properties.
It is important to take into account the drying time of the compositions, it can vary from several hours to several days. Natural oils, acrylic mixtures have a long drying period or accumulate strength gradually, over time, so it is important to limit the use of the countertop during the drying period.
It is impossible to protect wood from scratches and mechanical impacts with paints and varnishes or oil compositions, so there is only one way out - to treat wooden countertops with the utmost care.
The slight casualness of the wooden surface will give the kitchen…humanity. Isn’t that what we value most? Humanity… to the kitchen? And why not?
