Making The Island

With a lot of work, the bulk of it done by The Wife, our house (particularly our kitchen) is starting to come together. We think we'll have everything ready to go around Thanksgiving. Just in time for the holidays, so no one will come to our housewarming.

(Is it really a "housewarming" if you've already been living in the house for a month or more?)

So, since we don't have enough to do to finish the remodel, we decided to take on a new project: building a floating kitchen island. One morning's worth of cooking eggs and bacon convinced me that there is inadequate storage space, so we needed more cabinets somewhere. The Wife's solution: buy pre-made cabinets, mount them on casters, and put a topper of some sort on there. We're staining the island cabinets to match the ebony stain on the mounted kitchen cabinets, and while ideally I'd like to find the same kind of granite tile that's in the kitchen now, we're settling for a butcher-block top. She also sold me on the idea of properly-stained beadboard to line the cabinets with; when it's all done it should be quite impressive.

I don't know how much things like this cost retail. Our raw materials were just over $400.

Some time over the course of this week, I'll assemble the various parts and we'll get the thing in the kitchen. I also have to finish cleaning out the last of the cabinet doors because the goopy stain remover didn't work as well as we'd hoped. The Wife's job is to finish the pantry doors and get the completed cabinet doors re-mounted (because the cats keep crawling in the cabinets that don't have doors, and eating the people food inside).

All the work is starting to wear at The Wife, whose mood today was not good. I'm sore, too, but I suspect it's worse for her. Breathing all of those paint and stain fumes can't be helping, either; we've both been fighting splitting headaches all day. All I can do is help her as best I can and hope she starts to feel better soon.