Our Apartment Therapy kitchen island

Woot! I'm so excited about this post! Can you tell???

This is part two of the kitchen island post. Part one is Sneak Peek.

We got this dresser from Grand Repeats in Wausau. When I told Gloria, one of the owners, that I was planning to repurpose a dresser into a kitchen island, she got super excited and showed me a few pieces. This one was out in their garage, which means that they hadn't done any work to it, and sold it to us as is. They were great to work with!

Just as a reminder, here is the dresser after we took out the drawers and knocked off the top:


Since they sold it to us as is, Mr. Wonderful had to do a little work to the structure of the drawers to make them more sturdy. After that we did some light sanding, and I started priming. I also primed the towel bar and corbels that we bought:

After the priming, we did two coats of paint. We chose Behr "Happy Camper." Isn't that the best name for a paint color? I ended up attaching the towel bar before the second coat, because as you can tell from the picture above, it was kind of awkward to paint without smudging it.

After that, we attached the corbels to the back side of the dresser. The back isn't flat, but it still worked.

Meet my handsome handyman:

Handsome handyman did something with dowels in the corbels to attach the top. Boy I wish I had asked him more about this step right now. It involved wood glue, making a hole in the top of the corbel, and.....yeah:

The dresser already had casters, but we replaced them with these antique-y beauties from Home Depot. They are much smoother than the old ones. We decided on casters because you are technically supposed to have 36 inches on each side of a kitchen island and we don't (small house love!). So if we need to shove it over to get around it, it's no problem!

For the top, we found a piece of edge-glued board from Home Depot that looked like butcher block, stained and shellac-ed it, and pieced it together for the top. The thing that made butcher block sooooo expensive for this project was the custom size. Most countertop material comes in a standard width, but since we wanted a breakfast bar, cost was prohibitive. So, Mr. Wonderful used the corbels and some "T" brackets underneath to put the edges together:

Here is a shot showing off the adorable drawer liners I found at the Dollar Store. I love the vintage-y print:

And here is the final product! We looooove the extra counter space and look of our kitchen island. All together, the island cost about $200 and the chairs were another $100. I saw something sort of similar today for $550 WITHOUT the stools or the breakfast bar extension.

Thanks for reading!!!