DIY budget outdoor kitchen build part 6! Blackstone is installed! #Vevor #633

So welcome back, everybody. My name's Andrew, and you're watching the Kelley's Country Life. If this is your first time visiting the channel, thanks so much for stopping by. If you're interested in the outdoor kitchen build, we've had a long running series for this, showing all the details leading up to this point. So you may want to go back and check the other videos before watching this. So real quick, this was supposed to be the last video, but I have had a ton of y'all reach out saying, please keep the series going and keep all the little details, tips and tricks in the video. And I'll let y'all know, I'm no professional. I'm just a DIY homeowner that's trying to build his own house, is what I've done here. And I'm trying to build my own outdoor kitchen to stay within a budget. We dive right into this. I want to say a huge thank you to VIVOR. They're a company that I reached out to and asked if they would sponsor some of the stainless doors and drawer sets for this build. That helped us out financially so we could put our money in other build materials and appliances, and they reached out. And not only did they donate those items in, which we'll include the cost of at the end of this, but they also provided discount codes down in the video description. If you're looking to build your own outdoor kitchen and want to purchase some stainless drawer sets, trash pull-outs, stainless barbecue doors, things like that, they sell every bit of that on their website and they provide a discount codes for you, the viewer, down in the description. So check that out. All right, so one thing people noticed in one of the last episodes was that they said, hey man, your edges look rough. You know, what's going on there? Well, that's because I still have to trim out that and this area where the Blackstone's going. I already have aluminum trim over here. I just bought a piece of, you know, outside corner aluminum from Lowe's, painted it up the same color to kind of match everything else that we have going on. So we're about to cut that, just silicone it in place. We're good to go there. So let's get with it. All right, before I finish any more trimming, I'm letting some caulk dry that I just put down. So let's go ahead and knock out some wiring. I'm not giving you electrical advice because I am not a licensed electrician, but luckily we are allowed to do stuff on our own homes here. I even pulled the electrical permit to wire my entire house. I happen to live in an area that allows that. Now code is difficult to interpret. As you can see, I'm putting a standard outlet out here, but I'm putting it behind a weatherproof enclosure. That's because where this line ties in, it ties into a GFI receptacle over here. And the way it reads, especially if you wired in correctly, everything downstream from a GFI receptacle will actually trip the first one in line. And you have to be careful the way you wire them up, line that side, input side, output side, basically. I also ran GFI breakers in the house. So it's kind of foolish to do both. You do one or the other. So you have an option of doing standard outlets on a GFI breaker that covers everything in that outlet, or typically whenever you're doing individual outlets, it's more cost-effective to go get a GFI with a push button receptacle itself. But I'd be curious to hear y'all's thoughts on that. I'm also hooking up 20 amp receptacles because I've wired all of my circuits on 20 amp breakers. And as you can see by the yellow coated wiring right here, all my wiring is 12 gauge. I designed all my receptacles to handle a full 20 amps. Well, technically it's a 20 amp circuit that is only designed to run 80% of a load on a circuit. At least that's what code calls for. And I definitely want everything out here to be full capacity because of all the cooking devices and things that may run out here. Crock pots, Instapots, everything else. Those are heating devices and they'll pull a heck of a load. So no matter what, if you are building you an outdoor kitchen, it's considered either a damp or wet location depending on how you build it. You need to have some sort of ground fault protection, whether that be the receptacles or a GFI breaker. You need to check your local code for that and make sure you're doing it safe and doing it right. All right, so there is my cover with that full gasket seal pressing against the tile. It should keep any water out. And I was thinking about painting these black to really blend in, but just so happens they perfectly match the gray here. You see gray everywhere else. I think it'll look okay. I can always pop these right off and paint them same color black as this. All right, so I'm getting ready to install my cooktop and there's quite a few things that I need to do here. By the way, you're gonna see bugs everywhere. If you don't live in the South, especially in Florida, we have something that's called a love bug that comes through twice a year. They just do a major migration and we all, all of us local residents hate them. They just swarm you. Check this out. So these worthless bugs right here, supposedly rumor was back in the day, they were created to help with mosquitoes here by University of Florida and released. Well, they do nothing. They do absolutely nothing. All they do is follow around and well, make love like that. And they literally swarm. Look, just look at all of them. They're everywhere. Look, look at this. So frustrating. And the little orange heads that they have are like mildly acidic. So whenever you run into them and hit them on the front of your car, they actually eat through the clear coat and into the paint if you leave it on there. Whenever you drive through thousands a day, there's nothing you can do about it. Just thought I'd mention that. I didn't want people thinking there was some kind of roaches or something flying around here. It's just, we get swarms twice a year in the spring and the fall as they move, I guess, going down south to get away from the cold and then migrate back up. So I don't know. Super aggravating. Luckily they're not here for very long. So I bought a super cheap cooktop off of Amazon and as expected, it's from overseas and has the most worthless manual in broken English that I have ever seen. Doesn't tell me anything. I'm just gonna take a wild guess at some of this stuff. Typically most gas stoves come set up for natural gas. Natural gas is not common down here at all. Everybody runs propane if you're gonna run gas. So luckily this one I made for sure if I bought it, come with extra nozzles. It doesn't tell me which are for what. I'm gonna assume it's already set up for natural gas. So I'm about to convert these nozzles which are stamped with different sizes. I'm gonna convert these over to what I'm assuming is propane. You can see the size differences here. So I'm using the smaller number on the smaller burners. Larger numbers up to the larger burners. So all it is is a little screw-in orifice right there with a little hole and it comes with a provided wrench. So I'm gonna take out what I'm assuming is the natural gas nozzles. Typically they're bigger if I remember correctly. Propane usually burns a little hotter. Okay, this is gonna be a nightmare trying to work down in this tight space. So I'm gonna put these nozzles in. Then we're gonna hook up our regulator right here after I get all the love bugs out of it. And then plumb everything in, seal this and get our first appliance on the countertop. This is a good time to flip the top over and go ahead and install a gas regulator. By the way, there's always an in and out on these. So watch your flow. And it's worth repeating again. I know a lot of you are watching this and just looking at building your outdoor kitchen. If you're gonna put a cooktop in, make sure you find one that is convertible to the gas that you're gonna run. I can see a lot of people wanting to run off propane. Don't forget, the majority of these, including home stoves, come set up for natural gas. Now, the majority of home stoves also come with a conversion kit. I'm using a liquid thread compound that is rated for gases, making sure you do that. Drop this down in here. Okay, I've got the gas. I traced the line out, got the gas going to this one. Let's see. Okay, lit. That one's lit. That one's also lit. Okay, obviously it's completely purged of air and I have every single burner running. They all look good. So obviously I put the right nozzles in and we've got enough supply, gas supply, to run them. I know it's gonna be just about impossible for y'all to see on camera. I don't know if y'all can see the flames coming out. This big burner has flames coming out around the outer ring and a center ring. So another little tip for y'all, almost all burner knobs or burners themselves are adjustable. So if you get one, make for sure that you've got the right nozzles in, first of all, depending on if you're running natural gas or propane. And whenever you turn your nozzles on low, your flames should barely, and I mean barely be rolling around the edge of these caps. Just so happens they provide a little screwdriver here. If you pop the cap off, this is just like your home stove, anything else. Sometimes home stoves will have a little hole right there that you go into. These, you actually drop straight down in the knob and screwdriver just fell in the slot. So if I was adjusting this burner, for example, so this will actually adjust, it's probably an air to fuel ratio. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but you can watch your flame and it'll actually adjust it up and down. When you turn on low, you want that flame barely looking around the edge of that top. And then when you go back up wide open, you want it coming out. And sometimes you'll see it be an orange flame, which requires some adjustments. You want to get it to where it's just a nice blue flame. So you can do those adjustments underneath your knobs. Right, other than caulking around the outside edge and making this look good, this part's done. I'll check for gas leaks with a little soapy solution. Once I hook everything up, I'm going to go ahead and kill the gas now. We know the stove itself is good. It's going to be so nice having this cooktop out here and can do some real cooking. Absolutely real cooking. That worked amazingly well. Nice. So I'm going to be randomly jumping all over the place because I've still got to make one more hardware store run, but I want to go ahead and install everything I can to see what else I need to pick up. So I'm about to drop this drain down into the sink. And let me go ahead and forewarn you. A lot of people try to use the rubber washer and a foam washer that comes with this. One up top and drop it through and one on the bottom. That's not the way they're designed. Get you some plumber's putty. Comes in a little tub like this. It's just like Play-Doh. Take your wad out and start rolling it. Plumber's putty is key to get a good sink drain to seal. Ask me how I know. I've tried to skip all around this step over the years. You need this stuff. So just roll it out like dough. Get you a long thin piece. I should have used this too. This stuff's also excellent for putting in a circle and pressing down. Like when I was drilling through that tile earlier and I could have poured water right in the center of this and then water would have stayed around my tile bit. Plumber's putty is good for that or even Play-Doh. So I'm going to run some of this plumber's putty around this. You can see what I'm trying to accomplish here. Long story short, I'm trying to get a really good seal inside of the sink. Once I tighten everything down, this will press out. I've been somewhat successful using silicone like that too, but this is much easier to clean up than silicone is. I'll drop this right down into the sink on top of that putty right there. And then I'll go underneath the sink, foam piece up, then rubber washer, then this big old plastic nut that comes in there and I'll tighten everything down and pull this piece down into that plumber's putty, sealing it up. I really like that this sink come with an awesome strainer too. Drops right down in there. Catch all the food and other bits. And there you go. Pull it right out. It's pretty neat. Something important worth talking about here because a lot of y'all are going to be building an outdoor kitchen and well, you're going to be pulling a permit and following code on that. And things can get really confusing with code. Luckily, I'd already discussed a lot of this with my inspector months ago while I was building my house and told him about my future add-ons out here. So I purchased what's called an air admittance valve, which a lot of people call these studer valves. I think it's what my inspector called it, but I've always known these to be air admittance valves. And long story short, this has a plunger in it that will allow when water's flowing and pulling a vacuum, air must always follow water. Just like when you hold your finger on the end of a straw, the water stays in it. As soon as you take your thumb off the end of that straw, the water goes out. That's because the air is allowed to enter the space. There's got to be something in this space, whether it's water or air. But long story short, this plunger will actually pull down and pull air in to follow the water all the way up to my septic system whenever I'm running this. And the reason that's important, if I didn't have this in line to pull some air in, my trap right here, which is designed to hold water, and this comes from the sink drain right here, air would have to pull in through the sink drain and it would pull my trap empty. Well, guess what? Now I have an open line down to my sewer and eventually gases will build up and come back out. That's the whole point of this loop seal or P-trap right here, as a lot of people call them, S-traps or everything else, depending on the design. They're designed to hold a little bit of water pressure in here so as gases build up from your sewer, it can't push that water back up because now there's head pressure and escape back out, giving you nasty smells or potentially harmful gases inside a home, not so harmful outside. So typically what you do is you run a vent stack up through the wall and out the roof. Well, that's not really convenient out here in this location or like, say, an island kitchen. A lot of people put in island kitchen sinks. That's where these air admittance valves come in. So we don't pull this empty, we pull air here. And as the water rushes down in here, it can't actually come back out because it'll push this back up and seal it. So there's not much concern there unless this is malfunctioning. So if you want to read the code, it's in the universal plumbing code, the UPC section 918. And it talks about air admittance valves. So it says, if you're on an individual branch, which I am, and I'm not trying to make a full vent stack here, I have to be a minimum of four inches above this level right here. Some people say it's above your trap. Again, you're gonna get all kinds of feedback on code here. And we are a minimum of four inches. The factory's already set this up with this piece that I bought that looks just like this. And clean your joints before you glue them together. Really does help the gluing process. All right, it's getting ready to storm out here. So let's show this nice and quick. I've got my drain with an extension tube coming down out of the sink itself, going to my trap. I decided to go ahead and put an even longer piece in here and get this up about six inches. That is my air admittance valve. So remember, code says it has to be four inches above this surface right here. And I'm sure plenty of people want to say, that's not what code says. But go read it for yourself, interpret it for yourself. All right, so as I figured, there's just not quite enough room back here to put the factory grease tray from Blackstone. I could, but then you have to bring the Blackstone itself out about that much further from the cabinet. And it just doesn't look good. We don't want to do too much trouble to have this thing hanging out here and not looking the world's best. So I put the griddle on top. I seen where the bottom of the griddle was, made me a mark on the tile back here. I've got all my spacings. Went and found some scrap steel in the shop. And I am going to build me a catch pan and drip tube that'll run all the way through us. We're going to cut through the tile in the bottom shelf here. And through the cabinet doors in the bottom, I'll have that drip tube go in some sort of plastic catch tray or some sort of catch pan itself. So I'll admit, I am the world's worst about over-complicating things. So I already had this elaborate design in mind that I was probably going to spend the rest of the afternoon building with drop tubes. I was going to have to drill and cut through my tile. What was I thinking? So this almost fits. It's just a little too deep. I have about two and a half inches. This is about, well, three and a half inches. I got to thinking, I want to take some of this scrap steel I got, make one of these that'll clamp right on the back. It'll fit in the room that I have. And just make it a little longer so it still holds every bit as much as this will. And by the way, we don't have to change this out very often at all. It doesn't fill up that quick. And the good news about this is, if I build this and decide, you know what? I don't like it. It doesn't hold enough or it's aggravating. Well, the beauty of it is, pull the Blackstone right back out, which is very easy to do, and then build that big elaborate system that I was talking about. So making those shallow cuts like I did allows me to go take a hammer and fold that metal right over, get a nice outside edge, and then just throw a few tack welds in to strengthen that back up. Nothing critical about this. All right, so I'm going to go fill this up with water now that I have my new catch pan. And if I don't see any leaks, the last thing you want is an oil leak out there. I'll test it now. I'll go ahead and weld this little catch on that I made. And we have us a new thin grease pan. All right, so before I put the Blackstone back in here and kind of tidy everything up, I need to drill a hole all the way through the tile, through the plywood and the cement backer board to run my gas line up through. And I bought a really cheap set, but had excellent reviews of tile boring bits. I mean, I got a full kit with really large ones all the way down to, I mean, really, really tiny ones wrapped up in a bag like that. But as a full kit, it was not much money. And as y'all seen, I've already done used this once to drill the hole through for the faucet back there. It cut right through it. Absolutely no problem. So I'm going to put this in the description. I don't know how long they're going to hold up, but they cut through so easy. I was highly impressed. And I have found you don't start out with a tile bit straight up and down like this. It'll walk all over the place on you. Come in at an angle like that, cut a groove. So once you start cutting the groove, then you work the drill over in, and that groove, that lip holds this bit in. Then you go in and then you cut straight down. Seems to work great. And anytime you're running these, you need to dampen the area. And I keep a damp enough rag that I can squeeze water out around this while I'm drilling through too, but it goes through so quick, you hardly have time to put water on it. And it's done already cut through the tile that quick. Wow. I'm going to go ahead and knock that piece of tile up before I cut through the concrete board. And just that quick, right through the cement backer board. Now I'm down to the wood. So for that, I'll just go get a regular wood boring bit, go through. We're good to go. Pop the gas line right up through. And I made sure I drilled and put this underneath the side of the Blackstone that has a heat shield down there to protect the fuel line. Cause that's actually where the propane tank typically sits in the stand. So they have a big heat shield over here. I don't want to have my hose underneath, say the dead center of the Blackstone that's wide open and the burners are right there above it. Cause you're just kind of asking for trouble doing that. Okay. So here is my custom built grease pan. As you can see, I've set it up a little different than factory. So something worth noting, I put spacers on it right here. I just welded a couple of nuts on because the factory pan actually just sits out in thin air and it's very floppy. And if it fills up, it kind of tends to want to drop in on you because it doesn't actually lean against the backside of the Blackstone. These allow that to not happen. Now it's fully supported as it fills up, doesn't want to buckle and come in, which it's not going to do that with that thick piece of steel anyways. As you can see, I also welded a back plate on here. So as I have my griddle up here and I'm scraping food and flinging it to the backside, it doesn't overshoot this pan and get all on my back wall. So that's something I really wish the factory had right there. But as you can see, this just drops right back down in the factory hole. Fits nice and neat back there. You can see I already got some stuff I scraped into it and I could make this as big as I wanted. You know, I got to thinking, another thing that I could do if I want to, I'm not happy with this, but I think this will last a while before I have to dump it. I could actually angle this or build another one to where a tube run down this way. And then you can see, I have this wide open space on the side. I could even put a big grease trap tray over here that a tube comes and drips into and you could pull it, well, right out. Or I could cut a hole in the bottom of this, weld a pipe to it and go back all the way down through the cabinet like I originally talked about. But I like this design. I think it's going to work really good. So now it is time for things to start looking a whole lot better. Getting rid of these big, open, ugly holes and getting all this stainless stuff in. So this is the company right here, Vivor. I've worked with them in the past, been an excellent company to deal with. I reached out to them in the beginning of this build because we've worked together before because I was on their website one day looking for something else and started seeing all these outdoor kitchen and barbecue door sets and drawer sets. And I said, whew, that would sure work. Plus the prices were already amazing. So I reached out to them, asked them if they'd be interested in sponsoring this outdoor kitchen build on the channel by donating some of this stainless equipment that you're seeing. And they said, yes, no problem. They have also put discount codes down in the video description right here if you want to buy any of this stuff right here. So huge thank you to Vivor for sending that out. Check them out. Like I said, they really do help us out. This allows us to take the money that we would have spent on these things and put elsewhere in the kitchen itself and keep producing this content. So you've seen, I just installed their trash insert right there. Now I'm gonna install their door sets. They have a couple of different kinds and I'll show you. But the ones with the lip all the way around that has the slots in it like this, these are the ones that are designed to actually go into an area and drop in fit, kind of like a drop in sink itself. They even have flush in door sets. I'll show you one in a minute. So these literally drop in this opening that I already made for them. And now I can use any one of those, what was it? Eight slots to shoot screws in up or to the sides into my wooden supports. And then these things are ready to go. It's just that simple. All right, so just like that. So simple. I have my door sets ready to go. Now they also come with the handles. We'll install that in just a minute. But everything you're seeing me install today is 304 stainless steel. These doors are double wall now. So if you had heat or some issues going on the barbecue door set, you know, double wall thickness adds some insulation value. And every door set comes with hanger hooks. So if you have this under a grill like this, for example, the hooks come in the packaging. You can hang utensils in here as well. Full length welded in hinges. Really hard to beat for the money. Y'all look at the price of all this stuff in the description. It'll blow your mind. Like night and day cheaper than KitchenMaid and some of the other stuff out there. All right, well, I'm gonna knock out the rest of this stuff and then we'll show it off. We'll get the handles on it and hangers in. It shouldn't take me but just a few minutes to screw all this stuff in because I've already did the prep work ahead of time, framing out all the openings exactly to where this stuff can just screw right in. So here's a different door set that I accidentally ordered, but it'll work just fine for what I'm doing. But I want to show people, as you can see, this style has tabs on the outside and a much larger, deeper face that does not overlap and then have the connections on the inside. So the style that I'm putting in everywhere else like this has that internal lip and this is designed to fit in a cutout. What this style right here would be really good for if you were doing a stone outdoor kitchen area. A lot of people do that and you cut your stone flush, but stone is bumpy on the outside so you don't actually put something over it. You've actually bucked the stone up to a style like this. Now this is working just fine for what I'm doing, but the other style is better for wood cutouts. But I just want to let y'all know that they also offer door sets for stone barbecue or outdoor kitchen areas as well. They have all different styles, more than what you're seeing right here. All right, so I've got to check in the footage. We have a way more footage than I realized. This video is running quite long. So I think we're going to cut it off right here. We made some excellent progress in this. So we've got our cooktop in. By the way, you can see I bought another Blackstone lid to go over and protect this cooktop whenever we get blowing rain in. But we've got our five burner cooktop hooked up ready to go. I'm going to try to come up with some way to secure this down too. So when we get these severe afternoon thunderstorms with high winds, the last thing I'd want is this become airborne, bust high up and scratch the side. So I'm thinking about putting some clamps in somewhere where I can do one of those heavy, heavy duty rubber bungee straps to hold this down. The one for the Blackstone, I can actually hook to the Blackstone itself as heavy as that is. Not worried about that becoming airborne. One thing that I forgot to mention, you can see that I did with this Blackstone, I left about a three inch gap on either side and about a two and a half inch gap on the backside all the way around. And it turned out perfect because everything's black. These black open cavities just kind of blend right in. One thing I could do is put some stainless screen right there and paint it. Although there's so much heat that comes out of there, you would have to use like a high temperature barbecue paint. And that's only if you were concerned about something falling down in there or just didn't like the gap. But personally, I think the gap looks perfectly fine. So as you can see black, well, black blends in with black. So that's a critical step in something that people do not need to skip in my opinion. You're asking for trouble. I see a lot of builds online where people build right up to the side of a Blackstone, blocking the vents on the side, blocking the way for heat to escape. Although the majority of the heat does come out right here underneath the griddle top itself, there's vents around the side for a reason. Pull air in for good ignition, for the propane and the flame, as well as you will feel a lot of heat come out of there. So I made for sure I left a big enough gap around this for this thing to breathe and not get what's right beside it. So extremely hot. The other thing we've noticed from the little bit of time we've been running this, there's enough heat that comes off the backside that the metal trim edge gets quite hot to the touch and the fan is critical. We've noticed if we cut the fan on, which we put it there to aim at our heating appliances, that fan moves enough air to blow the heat out this direction, not even toward the people that are sitting. So that's awesome. And you can literally put your hand right on this, the entire cook, which we've yet to cook for a while, but we've let this run and been doing some testing. So I will mention that a fan, whether it be one that could sit up here and blow across the backside or that one up there, really does feel like it's a critical piece of equipment because I would be scared that the paint would actually bubble off of this metal trim edge. So keep that in mind, but the fan makes all the difference in the world. As you can see, I decided to go on back and paint the outlet covers black. Tiffany wanted me to do that. Use the same paint. Looks awesome. Now they blend in really, really well. I've still got to come back and caulk these in, but I just threw some PVC quarter round up. We were undecided on a backsplash and we know that we could pull that out at any time. We went and looked at PVC trim boards for a backsplash. Didn't find any that we liked. So we just slapped this quarter round in. That keeps stuff from going back there. Water, fluids, things such as that. Refrigerator's in. I'm waiting on a short extension cord to fire that up. Sink is in and working. Hot, cold water. Everything is fully tested. So nice having a sink out here. We've already been using it. Now, the one thing I do not like about this faucet, although I can't complain, I got it on a lightning sale for like $30 on Amazon, but you can see it's angled a long ways this way. So when you turn the water on and go to washing your hands right here, water does kind of want to splash back out on you. So we found that when you wash your hands to the side, we've got plenty of room. If I replace this faucet, I'm going to get one that will actually bend further down like a normal sink faucet and will be beautiful. Good to go. So you can see all of our door and drawer sets. We'll go over all this in the next episode, show everything working from the Blackstone to all the drawer and door sets. But again, a big thank you to V-Board for sending these out. Also got drawers up here. We're already slowly starting to stage some stuff, even though we still got a little bit more building to go. Okay, like I said, I know that we have run really long here. So coming up in the next episode, stuff's about to get fun. I already have some stuff showing up on the side porch over here from UPS. And I got a few more things going to show up today. We're going to start doing the fun and detailed things in the next episode, really wrap this up and get y'all that total cost breakdown and show this thing off. And what I mean by some of that accessory stuff, well, we're going to be mounting the outdoor TV, right? What good's a kitchen and bar area without a TV? We have some lighting to put in. I'm going to vent these cabinets so they can breathe. I think that's going to be very important out here in a high humidity state. I've got a full rubber mat coming in that we're going to have to trim to fit down in here. So we don't have to worry about grease spills and things hitting the floor. Plus it's really going to transform this area. Imagine this entire floor being jet black now. It's just really going to tie everything together. At least I think that it will. And then we have some stuff that we're going to do outside on the porch that's going to essentially help the kitchen as well. So really fun episode coming up. Thank y'all for all the positive feedback, for all the views, for sharing this and really helping the series be a success. We'll catch you on the next video. If you have any questions about anything that I've done, drop a comment down below and I'll answer those as best I can. Take care.