The Beginning of THE ISLAND PROJECT... Planning

OK - so my great rental farm house that I took up residence in after The D word has literally 4 feet of counter space.

And while all the rooms are big and airy and have lots of windows, not the little, teeny, tiny kitchen. Didn't people "back then" value their kitchens? It was a mystery why the kitchen was so short-ended. Even more for me was where the hell to put my microwave. I contemplated not even having a mircrowave but already get strange enough looks not having cable or a TV bigger than 10" (or whatever size it is!)

So - the microwave took up some of that precious counter space and plans for making a super-deluxe kitchen island started taking up precious brain space.

I started with a month of planning. Yes. A month. It takes a lot of hours of brain storming what do I want, what do I need, and what can I accomplish with my tools, space, and skills. After many hours of pinterest browsing I came up with a small sketch & list of "needs/wants."

These were my final notes to myself completed on 10/27/2013. In the end, the island looks very similar to what I sketched out.....

I'm sorry for the bad quality of these notes. They were made in pencil.... but once I knew what I wanted I had to start working out how it would get built and what materials would be needed. I think one misconception I had was that it would be "cheap" to build. All in, by the end, it was probably several hundred bucks. BUT - it started out very cheap with these finds:

These are cabinets I found on the side of the road. While I'm not prone to grabbing other people's trash, this was hard to pass up. I took it apart before I took the picture but this cabinet has a door, all hardware & a working drawer.

This was me playing in the garage with an arrangement. I knew I wanted the island to have a microwave cabinet on one side. Could the microwave go on top of the single cabinet on it's side? In the end, this didn't happen. 

I taped an aerial view of the island on the kitchen floor and we walked around it for a few weeks trying to see how it would feel in the already small kitchen. I read a lot of sites that said at minimum, have 36" of walking space around the island. I wouldn't have that. I'd have 27". But the oven door could open and so could the cabinets under the sink. I needed the 6' of counter space I was creating to say nothing of the storage & microwave "home" more than I needed a comfortable 36" of walk around.....

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And so this is the start of my second greatest project. It turns out just amazing. Over the next few weeks I'll be spelling out the steps. I took a lot of pictures. This isn't beginner carpentry but someone handy could do all of what I'm about to show. This project took us until July of 2014 to complete. Almost 9 months. But it was worth it.

NOW WHAT?