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 The day starts with sanding the butcher block with 180 and 220 grit paper, top, sides, and ends. This removes any lacquer that may have settled out of the air onto it and prepares the wood for oiling.
It is a good practice, after you've finished the final sanding, to rub it down with a damp cloth. This raises the grain. Let it dry and sand with 220 again. If you're obsessive-compulsive, do it a second time. Once you've got all the trouble makers sanded off, the new owner should not have trouble with the block getting "fuzzy feeling" after they wash it off the first time.
 We use 100% pure mineral oil for treating our blocks and cutting boards. This brings out the beauty of the wood, protects the wood from contamination when in use and from water when being cleaned.
Never use vegetable oils to treat a butcher block or cutting board: all vegetable oils including peanut oil, safflower oil, and walnut oil will build up with repeated applications and will go rancid it the wood, possibly causing sickness in you family. Always use pure mineral oil on wooden cutting boards and blocks.
 After applying a liberal coat of oil we work it in with a soft cloth by continuously rubbing in small circles to keep the oil spread around and work it into the wood. It takes at least 5 minutes of rubbing, more for a large block like this one. Watch for dry spots and move more oil into areas that are thirsty. Keep all parts of the board wet. End grain will be especially thirsty.
 After the oil has had time to soak in, take a clean, dry, soft cloth and remove the excess oil. Flip or change the cloth as often as necessary. Buff the board to a soft sheen. Give it a few minutes, then check it again, you may find spots where oil continues to wick up out of the wood. Just keep buffing until no oil is left sitting on the surface.
 A word about wood cutting boards and food safety. Some folks will try to tell you that a Polycarbonate, polypropylene or acetate cutting board is safer than a wood board for preparation of food, especially meats because there is no place for juices to hide on their smooth, hard surfaces, making them easier to clean and thus more sanitary. It sounds good, but is actually quite wrong. Aside from being much tougher on your knives edges, the plastic does eventually begin to score, offering minute hiding places for germs. This scoring is difficult to remove from plastic. On a wooden board, sand with 220 grit paper and re-oil. But the best reason to use a wooden board is that the wood itself contains enzymes that actually fight the bacteria that cause food poisoning. Just clean the surface with warm soapy water after use and wipe dry. Plastic boards require fancy sanitizers -- that may also get into your food.
 While the oil "dries" we work on re-mounting drawer fronts and doors. The false drawer fronts are especially important right now because it's much easier to access their mounting screws through the top. Once the top is in place, driving those screws would mean crawling into the cabinet. And this cabinet just isn't big enough for that.
 Now we flip everything over and mount the cabinet to the butcher block. The mounting screws are driven from inside the cabinet, so it is much easier to keep everything in alignment as well as drilling pilot holes and driving the screws this way than it would by crawling inside the narrow compartments and twisting around to work over our heads.
 All Done!
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