Dresser into Kitchen Island: Part 1

Ever since we planned to take the wall down between our kitchen and our living room, I knew that I wanted an island in the kitchen. Check out my taking down the wall post for more on that project. At first I thought that I would just extend our existing counter top to create the island. But, I quickly realized that this would be a costly and time consuming. So, on to plan b, create an island from an old dresser.

I decided to use an old dresser that we originally got from my husbands parents back when we moved into our first apartment. This is a child's dresser, our kitchen is not so big so it works well in our space.

I always forget to take pictures at the very beginning of my projects. So, if you can imagine this dresser originally had 4 drawers. We left the top one in, took the bottom three out and created two shelves. The shelves will ultimately be covered with doors that my Dad is making for me.

 The next step was to sand the piece to get it ready for painting.

 We also drilled the second holes for the handles on the top drawer.

We added a sanded plywood backing to the back for the dresser to give it more durability. After I painted it, the plywood did not look that great. We decided to take off the plywood and replace it with 1/2" MDF from Home Depot to get a really smooth surface that would more closely match the dressers wood.

I finished painting the base of the dresser, this took about 2 coats of semi-gloss paint. 

I hope to have the rest of the transformation and the finished project ready to post in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned...