Bypassing cave men and open fires with pots hung over, originally fitted kitchens were cabinets either from an early form of sheet timber (block board) or just a framed cabinet with a framed face. The worktop would be of wood, tile, stone or granite and most commonly a ceramic sinks. A more budget version and quite common would be a ceramic sink sat on two sections of brick wall and a slab of stone or wood as a worktop again normally sat on two sections of wall simple but effective. This is however a bit before my time so I wont pretend to know to much about this just what I have been told and seen in pictures.

Back to the framed kitchens I mentioned above. The purpose of the frames was to hang the doors from. This was because the only type of hinge readily available at the time was a butt hinge, like you would hang a normal internal door on. The doors would be made like a regular solid timber internal door (but smaller) five or six pieces of timber, varying in complexity and joined together to create a cabinet door, the sizes would be kept small to avoid any movement in the timber. There were many different individual techniques used by the craftsmen at the time but the important thing to realise is all the early furniture (including the lovely antique pieces you see on the antique road show) were all mad from wood. “Well what are the made form now paper?” well not quite but for the majority of today’s market its not wood like the old carpenters used to use. For more about Wood look out for “Hardwood Softwood Man maid Wood?” a blog coming soon to your PC. To continue… made form real wood.

This mean that everything was built by hand and therefore very time consuming but the most important part was the drawers. Each drawer would normally have been a dovetail box that slid on a wooden lat positioned either side of the cabinet, remember the old sit coms where someone would be attempting to open a jammed drawer and then when it was finally rived open it would come all the way out sending the content all over, ha ha. Funny and true unit drawers got a really bad press as did doors that could swell up resulting in them not closing. Real wood comes from a living tree and even when turned into furniture will still react to the elements and move this is an important thing to remember.