Throw Back Thursday: Island Awesomeness

I was looking up fun island quotes on pinterest, and came to one that read, "I'm an island of such great complexity".  I really liked that one, but with the horde around, this house is more like the island of misfit toys.

So a year and a half ago we bought the trashy house, and the renovating began.  Remember this?

Its okay to be jealous.  I know most people that come visit are struck speechless when they pull up.

Sadly this is much the was our place looks today.  Our big project for this year is going to be updating the siding, and putting on new front and back porches.

When we bought the place it had a kitchen too small for a dishwasher (WHAT?!?!?), and only enough standing room for one person.  It was in short, claustrophobic.  However just on the other side of one of its walls was a fairly big room rendered completely useless because someone had dumped a big rusted wood burning stove in the middle of it.  I do mean in the middle.  There was maybe 3 feet of walk space all the way around it.  So I had a brilliant we had the brilliant plan to knock down a wall, and use the entire space as our kitchen!  It was going to be epic, and a ton of work.

We replaced everything in this house.  We had the walls stripped to studs, the wires completely pulled out,  and in some areas the flooring pulled completely out or to the subfloor.  When this was happening, we decided to knock out the wall.  This of course was all in Señor Hotness's wheelhouse.  So I made myself scarce, and Señor Hotness had the missionaries come out to help him do the heavy lifting.  After we put everything back together it looked somewhat like this.

Isn't she pretty?

Look at all that space!  I needed to have a huge flipping place for us to eat, play, and do any and everything.  Especially since our old house didn't have a table the could even fit our entire family.

See?  Tiny.  Much to small for a family of 7.  We lived in that tiny house for 3 years, and had no room to entertain or have over friends anywhere in the house.

You always hear about how the kitchen is the heart of the home, and the place where everyone congregates.  That is absolutely what I wanted here.  On top of that I have a horde of ladies to teach to cook, craft and be awesome.  So what better than to have a ginormously awesome island.  Then we started to brainstorm.  During the actual construction I watched a ton of HGTV.  Just a heads up HGTV has next to no actual design shows actually on anymore its all House Hunters which someone with a new house/remodel project couldn't care less about.  The few that they had I DVRed to watch later when we would drag in after working crazy late hours on the house.  

This is when inspiration struck in the form of the HGTV show Meg's Great Rooms.  The episode we were watching they were making over an area for a family with 4 daughters.  HELLO!!! It was meant to be that we would fall in love with the concept of the island displayed in the show.  The island in that was a 9 foot by 5 foot with a concrete top, and it was awesome.  Our room could totally handle something that massive so then Señor Hotness got to designing ours.  He kept trying to make it a little smaller, but I was adamant that I NEEDED it that big.

We had Señor Hotness's older brother, Señor the Elder, custom built our beautiful cabinets, and he also made Señor Hotness's drawing come to life.  He took the drawing, and built this.

The picture is weird because we had it set on panorama, and it is sitting in what would be our family room.

Here it is in the kitchen.

We placed it back in the kitchen after it got a coat of stain.  The wood we used for this was birch, and Minwax Dark Walnut was WAY too dark for the room so this was covered with Minwax Provincial.  I'm kind of sketchy on the exact process used to finish this out as my awesome brother-in-law, Señor the Elder, did all the work on this because he's awesome.  Doesn't it look pretty though?  We really wanted this to have a solid stone top, but by this point in the renovation our time was gone.  We had sold our other house...the trashy trailer.  It sold on a Monday and was gone the next Monday, and we had one of the most epic cases of stomach bugs EVER.  Our move consisted of shoving our crap in trash bags, and bringing it over to the new place.  So due to time we put a wooden top on it. 

I blogged earlier about me finally making over the top here.  The island top was a bit of an eye sore, but it was useful.

Again forgive the wonky picture it was a panoramic.

It was awesome, but not with out its draw backs.  It is too wide to play card games on, but the awesome WAY out weighs the downsides.  For instance.

It has this awesome shelf for my crockpots and pressure cooker

And its wired for power!  Which is good because this is where I usually get on the computer.  The plug allows me to have marathon computer time.  You know if I wasn't the homeschooling mother to the horde, who also does WAY to many DIY projects.  It was also a big hit with the kiddos.

The ladies sometimes use it as a permanently built fort.  Because at counter height it is the perfect height for them to play under.  In the future I want to figure out a way to put cloth sides around it temporarily so that it feels more like an actual fort, and with this in the room...

They have been known to pull the bar stools out, and watch movies under there with sleeping bags and pillows.  It can easily and comfortably seat 12, but I only have 8 stools currently around it.  

My goal with this was absolutely to make it a gathering place in our home, and it has become that and so much more.  When we bought and remodeled the house we weren't homeschooling, but this is an awesome place for us to do school work with the kids, and that TV mounted on the wall also acts as a monitor for a computer.  Which helps us to look up learning aids.  This also seems to be the room that parents congregate at when we have friends over, to watch funny Youtube videos, or just laugh around the island.  The kitchen is by far my very favorite room in our house, and hands down where I spend most of my time.  The island makes the room, and I wouldn't change any thing if given the chance.  

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