After a bit of a blog hiatus, we are back! We have plenty of projects to share, but I’m going to start with one of our favorite and most useful. We moved into a new townhouse in May. It has a very open floor plan, which we love.
You can see from the blurry iPhone picture taken without any furniture that our kitchen consists of countertop space and cabinetry that spans one wall. After living there for several months, we were really feeling the need for more kitchen storage and countertop space. So, Adam’s brilliant, furniture-genius mind starting churning out kitchen island ideas.
Our final product is a steel topped island with wooden shelves. It also has a copper bar attached and two industrial bar stools. Not only do we love the look of the island, but it has made our kitchen more functional too, so it’s the best of both worlds. Extra counter space to work on? Check.
Extra storage space? Check.
Extra seating space for eating? Check.
Please ignore the mess in the background of all of these pictures. I was going to clean everything up, but instead just decided to keep it real!
The whole island is on wheels, so it’s movable if we need to clear the space for any reason and it’ll be much easier to lug around whenever we move to a new home. Also, the bar addition is removable in case we move to a place with an already existing breakfast bar. The final design works so perfectly for us, but it’s a far cry from the original plan that Adam hatched, which looked a little something like this.
The final product only came to be after many iterations of trying different things. As you may or may not be able to tell from the fancy iPad drawing above, pallets and an old door were pieces that didn’t make the cut to the final design.
Don’t worry-even though they didn’t get used in the island, you’ll see them make an appearance in future posts!
Adam came up with the idea to build a frame out of aluminum rails and rail fittings. We cut pieces of wood to create the shelves and added the steel top.
We stained the wood using Minwax Espresso then sealed with poly. We added wheels and then Adam built out a frame for the breakfast bar. We decided to create a copper bar top since we really liked working with copper in this project. We get our copper here and we went with 10 mil copper sheet because it’s bendable enough to form around the bar top, but strong enough to hold up for a long time.
In general, copper can be a little bit difficult to work with, but we like how it looks and how it changes over time. You’ll notice that the copper on our bar isn’t 100% smooth and that’s because we’re not perfect and we’re ok with that. Even though it’s not perfect, the best way we have found so far to create a copper finish is using dowel rods.
We got some melamine shelves and attached them together for a larger bar top.
Then, we prepped them with dowel rods and glued on our copper sheet, using a roller to smooth over the edges.
There is a good tutorial on how to attach copper to wood here.
Once that was done, we realized that we needed some barstools. We ordered stools similar to these, but wanted to stain and paint them to look like they were meant to go with our island.
We spray painted the metal and sanded, stained and sealed the wood components before putting the stools together.
Our new kitchen island was definitely a hit and we’re getting tons of use out of it. I think it is safe to say that this turned out to be one of our favorite projects to date.
