Kitchen Island Makeover

 

Our kitchen island is finished!  Woohoo!  All I need now is the hardware.  I'm very happy with how it turned out.  It took me longer than I had planned, but I think because I took my time on how I was going to achieve what I wanted, I got good results.

above

 (Before)

 

We added trim around the ends of the island and a toe kick using the same molding around the bottom.  We used real wood, since it's in the kitchen I don't want any warping problems.

The color I used I altered a bit.  I chose Palladian Blue by Benjamin Moore, 5% enhanced.  I thought it was a little too minty green, so I had about 4.5 drops of blue added into the mixture.  Now I did use a little bit of the paint before adding the extra drops, so on a full can maybe 5 drops would be about right.  I'm happy with how the color turned out, it's exactly what I was trying to get.  It goes really well with the blue green backsplash.

I used Advance Paint by Benjamin Moore to paint the island.  This is the best paint for cabinets out there.  It acts like an oil-based paint, but cleans up like like latex, just soap and water.  Awesome stuff!  I got a nice smooth paint finish, which was important to me.

There are so many great tutorials on painting your cabinets so I won't go into detail (see Kitchen Island Project), but one tip that was helpful was when you paint in the grooves using a good paint brush, wipe off the excess paint that gets onto the flat part of the cabinet.  If you don't you will have a build up on the edges, which you don't want for a nice even finish.  Also, I did use a wood grain filler and I think it worked out really well and was pretty easy to use, EXCEPT next time I won't do it in the groves of the door, it was too hard to sand out.  I will only use the wood grain filler on the flat part of the door.  I don't see the wood grain on the flat part of the doors now.

 above

(What the kitchen looked like when we moved in a year ago)

 

Now!

(after new backsplash and painted island)

I'd say we're getting there one step at a time.  Next for the kitchen:  paint the cabinets white!  I'm not sure where that lies on my to-do list, but I can't wait for the finish product.