The kitchen island continued

This week we continued the uber-important project of the kitchen island. The island is what I'm thinking of as a "domino project", meaning that once it's done, it allows other projects to fall in line behind it. (This is how I think I'm secretly viewing every project right now, but it's keeping me motivated!)

Much of what we've done on the house has been fairly sequential:flooring up before anything, popcorn ceiling down before we can paint, paint before floors, floors before trim, etc. But the island is different. We still have a ton of boxes in the "boys' room" (the second guestroom) that mostly contain my large kitchen items (blenders, crockpots, entertaining items, etc) and the Christmas decorations. The Christmas decorations are basically in two totes, so they don't matter much, but the kitchen stuff is a lot. I have resisted moving it to the other guest room because I don't want to move it, then move it back, then unpack it later (read that as I'm lazy, it's true and I refuse to work that hard right now). By building the island we are creating the permanent place where my large kitchen items will live, so the idea is, we get the island done and we can unpack the guestroom and get to work in there, finally wrapping up all the painting and flooring (for now, the kitchen and bathrooms will come later).

The island is also a test to see if we can move forward with building ALL of our cabinets. So far, so good!

Once we complete the island we will have tried our hand at all components: base cabinets, drawers, door fronts, drawer fronts, and shelves, so if we can do that (and don't go crazy) we can do all the cabinets.

Last week we built the small cabinet that will hold our pull-out trash on one side and my instant pot and kitchenaide on the other. We had some trouble with our initial measurements, but once we had it figured out we were able to finish it yesterday with the final support braces, which involved tons of pocket holes.

We carried it inside to see how it will look in the kitchen.

No, there isn't flooring under the island; with LVP you aren't supposed to put it under cabinets so we've had a random empty space for months that is smaller than the island but gave us somewhat of an idea where it would go. You can also see the electric we ran that will go in the island in that grey box on the floor.

We also started (and finished!) cabinets two and three this weekend.

Dad let us borrow his fancy pocket hole jig that's much better than ours so the pocket holes were a breeze!

We had to take the front door off the hinges to get the two larger cabinets in the house, they are just barely smaller than the doorway.

Once we had all three cabinets inside we spent time walking around the island, pretending to cook at the stove, prep food, etc to see how our spacing is (the island is huge and even though we measured like 472 times, we wanted to make sure it didn't just sound good on paper).

Don't mind the lack of doors on our pantry and our food on full display 😅 (at least you know we aren't starving!). There were sliding doors on it, but when we leveled the floor, we concreted the doors to the floor by accident (totally thought it would just flow under), and we just tossed them, they were a pain anyway.

Scott even put my kitchenaide and instant pot in my cabinet for me!

It's hard to tell, but there is totally space for a shelf to hold up the kitchenaide. It might be silly to have a cabinet for just these two appliances, but these two are large and awkward and either take up counter space, get put on top of the fridge (in the case of the instant pot), or end up buried in the back of a cabinet, so I love that they'll be easily accessible.

We actually went back and forth with what to do with this cabinet, it's only 17" wide, so we tossed around the idea of a bookshelf for my cookbooks and a wine rack, but I think we'll get the most use out of it this way.

A note about spacing, we will be rearranging the kitchen before it's all done, so the spacing will be a bit different than it is now. Because we were able to push back the wall next to the fridge to allow for more cabinet space (hence the new drywall, but almost 5 more feet of space!), we will be able to put pantry cabinets on that wall and move the fridge to where the pantry currently is. So for now, the side of the island by the fridge is a bit "tighter" (but still totally fine) than it will be when it's done.

I used Ikea's kitchen designer to map out what the layout will look like:

This isn't a great photo, it's a picture of my computer screen, and ignore the lack of color and finishes. I just wanted to be able to visualize the space.

The thing I'm most excited about in the whole kitchen remodel is actually the island because if the cabinet space (drawers, actually), but also the prep area. We've been using a 6ft folding table as an island since we put in the floors (the old cabinetry basically disintegrated when we moved it, it was particleboard and had previously been wet, yuck!) and it's constantly covered in tools. I'm promising myself when we have the island done I'll use it as a real kitchen island, not tool storage.

Today was my neice's birthday party (my mom's bday and my neice's bdays were this past week) so we rounded out a weekend of hard work with some celebrating.

For my mom's birthday my brother and I arranged some family photos as a surprise for her and they were too cute not to share!