Tuesday, February 19, 2013

WORKBENCH INTO KITCHEN ISLAND

I really wanted a kitchen island in our very open kitchen, not only for more storage space but for counter space too (especially sewing) so I was on the hunt for the right piece. It had to be the right height (counter height) and dimension as well as had shelving or drawers for storage. I found a work bench for free on craigslist and they delivered it for us too!

Here's the before. It's really sturdy, solid and well built - all wood.
Jared removed the top piece to expose the plywood.
The plan was to paint the whole thing but once he sanded down the top and it didn't look so bad we chose to varnish it instead. The next plan was to paint the whole bottom section but I started paint parts of it at time as I really liked the wood once it was sanded. I decided to leave parts of the wood exposed.

The work on it was the easy part - getting it into the house was not.


 It took a lot of troubleshooting to get it through the front door, but after some twisting and turning and measuring we finally got it in. Now for the even harder part - the kitchen door!
Jared had to take some of it apart after trying multiple ways to get it through.

 We had to remove the shelf that goes across the bottom so that it could turn through the door. 
This was not easy to do without wrecking it! But he did it and it went through!
 Jared put the shelf back on and it was finally complete!

Then we both just stared at it thinking - this thing is huge!
There's no turning back, we will make it work!
There were too places we could put it. Our original thought is as shown but I'm not liking it against our computer table. It needs to go straight back against the wall beside the stove - but where do we put our computer? Ugh.

 Jared doesn't like the drawers left wood, but I kinda do. I'm not sure weather to put back the hardware (it needs to be cleaned up) or find something new.

We still have to get a piece of paneling to cover the back of the drawers if we decided to keep it where it is, if we push it against the wall, I guess it will be covered by the stove.

2 comments:

kaly said...

I agree with Jared about painting the drawers. They aren't the nicest looking wood. They would look great painted a feature color though!

kaly said...

Good work!