Kitchen Remodel-Phase 5- The Center Island of DOOOOOOOM

Ok, so it was not so bad, but how many times do you get to write DOOOOOOOM  in a heading (plus or minus a few OOOOO's)? That should be on a bucket list somewhere. When we went into the remodel, we knew we were going to make a center island. When we were purchasing cabinets at IKEA they had no words of wisdom on how to do it. I goggled around a bit for some tips. I found this website and this one too that I thought were helpful. Really it just boiled down to just do it and make it work. Since we put in a floating floor, we decided the best thing was to put the floor in and place the all of the cabinets on top it. It would keep it down, all at the same height, and eliminate any bad looking edges. It just means that people better like our floor for a long time. Its a 20 year life span so it should not be a problem.

The island has a countertop length and width of 4 feet by 5 feet (about). This gives us an overhang on the far two sides of about 12 inches allowing us to create a breakfast bar. We wanted to keep it small though as our whole kitchen and house is very "tight" but still wanted the open feeling of a center island. The island helps bring together the kitchen, old dining room, and the living room.

To start with, we wanted an island that had storage on both sides. We selected two cabinets that were 12 inches deep with lots of shelves to hold things like fancy glasses and specialty cooking items. We butted these up to two cabinets that were the standard 24 inches deep facing into the kitchen. We built the IKEA cabinets.

We built a frame on the floor out of two by fours. This allowed us to attach the cabinets to the frame and the frame to the floor. We will cover the evidence of the frame by nailing over it with toe-kick.

To keep the cabinets stable while we worked, we would attach one to the floor, then attach it to its next door neighbor. It helped keep them steady, but it did mean we had to remove screws a couple of times and readjust!

Once we had all of the cabinets in, we adjusted them until they were parallel with the floor grain, otherwise it made the whole kitchen look loop-sided. We put a plug into the cabinet closest to the fridge, but dropping a hole into the floor and bringing up wire. We got a nice little remodel box to hold the electricity that does not interfere with any of the drawers.

To cover the sides, IKEA sold us two smaller appliance panels. Now the trouble with this was that they did not actually cover the whole side! Too short. We decided to use them on the side with the electrical plug as it would make it easier to put in the hole for the box. To make up for the two short, we used a T-mold for a matching floor to fit between the two pieces and make them the right length. You can kinda see it in the picture below. It looks a tiny bit different depending on the light. 

 For the other side, rather than having a seem facing out, Erik cut one of the bit appliance panels to the right length and attached it. Its nice, doing that actually saved us about $100 from using the two panels, plus it looks nice that there is no seem.

 For hardware we got some nice handles from Lowes. We got bigger 4 inch handles for all of the drawer pulls and smaller 3 inch handles for the cabinet doors. Here is a picture from Lowes.

So now we are just working on getting it all in and done. I will have some final pictures coming in soon. Right now we are trying to deal with a sink. Happy New Year!!!