Sneak Peek

Hi there,

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep. So I decided I would write a post. I don't know what it will be about yet. Shoot.

I guess I could do a teaser post for our new kitchen island. I haven't taken or downloaded all the pictures I want to for the after, but I think I have a couple of the pictures from the process.

So in our house, we have one of those kitchens that just takes up one wall, which equals not much counter space. We were also borrowing a kitchen table, and the owners of said table wanted it back. So, we were looking for counterspace and dining space. I found a great idea on apartmenttherapy.com where you use a dresser and repurpose it into a kitchen island. I figured it would be easy enough to extend the countertop to include a breakfast bar (weelllll, maybe I figured it would be easy enough for Mr. Wonderful to do it....) and that would take care of our dining issue. So we bought an antique dresser at a lovely store named Grand Repeats here in Wausau, Mr. Wonderful fixed it up, I painted it and we love it!

Here's the dresser (with the drawers and top removed):



We priced butcher block for the top, but it was ridonkeykong (30 Rock anyone?) expensive. I thought about doing enamel, galvanized tin sheeting, or trying to find a remnant of granite, but I really wanted the warmth of wood.

One thing I considered was getting a Craftsman butcher block workbench top I saw advertised at Sears. I don't know if it's the same as a countertop, but it was much less expensive.

Buuuut, we ended up finding edge glued boards at Home Depot that had the look of butcher block. We sanded 'em up, stained 'em and then used shellac that we had left over from a different project. The shellac isn't perfect, but then again it doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. From what I've read the finish might cloud up with water damage, but it can be re-done or we'll find a different solution.

Anywhooo, I should probably try sleeping again, but I'd hate to leave you without giving you some eye candy, here is the most beautiful thing in the world: