The kitchen table of my dreams - How we build our kitchen island.

Feb 11

Where can I start, If I was a table, I could be this one haha. Truly I am so in love with how this project turned out. The key to its success started with planning (this post), knowing exactly how we wanted it to be make the build go smoothly. We bought all the wood pieces we needed and we were ready to start working.

I have to say my husband was the mastermind of the engineering of this table. He designed the 3d model using solidwoork from a few hand drawn sketches I made and then he was the one putting every piece of this table together, I helped assembling the table as much as I could but he did the most part. He has the patience I don’t have for carpentry, it’s a work of art itself. I saved all the process from start to finish here.

We used dowel joints to assemble the table.

Once the structure was set I started working my magic with sanding and priming and then painting this stunning color called preference red by Farrow and ball, its such a good burgundy, the perfect balance of purple and red and it looks stellar with our green cabinets. Find videos of the paint process here, did you know you can get a very smooth paint finish with a roller? YES you can.

Then for the countertop we went back and forward with a few ideas like doing the same marble for the island but we decided not to move forward with that option because it was going to be very expensive since it was just a small island and we would have to buy a large slab, we also tried finding a soapstone remnant -no luck- or we considered doing butcher-block. Ultimately we went with the same wood we used for the table as countertops, poplar. It was affordable and I really like the natural wood color, a great base for any stain color. We glued 3 boards together to create a solid countertop and then sanded them well until the countertop was completely smooth and seamless.

For the wood top I wanted to keep it light to complement the floors instead of visually competing with them, we went with a light coat of weathered oak and It was just right. Then I did a polycrylic top coat to protect it and make it water proof.