Seeing Things From A Different Angle

The paint stripping is moving along at a blistering pace. I am 63% complete after 3 days and I got very little done yesterday. This is good and bad. It is good because this means I should finish up this weekend. This is bad because I still have not completely finished the design of the island.

Last week I flipped the position of the island 90 degrees on the kitchen floor. This solved a lot of problems with traffic flow and the over all stability of the island. However, this caused some problems with certain aspects of the original design. Here is a picture of the original design, and the second picture is where I’m at now.

Original Design

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Current Design


You can see I moved the cabinet doors from the long side to the front and the cantilevered counter was moved to the back. This means the corner shelf I had planned on will no longer work. There are no usable corners left. I don’t want a shelf under the counter because I don’t want to encourage people to put their feet up on it. So now I have this cube of dead space in between the sink and the counter and I’m not sure what to do with it.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about what to put there and I start to get these great ideas of complex shelves and cubbies for spices, cutting boards, maybe a garbage can (think kitchen apothecary table) and I start to wonder if I can pull it off (Yes, I’m at that stage again). So far the cabinets I’ve built have been pretty straight forward boxes. I haven’t done anything too elaborate. There is also the issue of making spaces that aren’t really functional and will end up being wasted space. I’m leaning towards something simpler.

So for more realistic ideas I’ve come up with these.

1) A garbage can behind a door and have a hole in the counter top to throw things down.

2) A simple pass-through shelf that will extend from one side to the other.

3) Open shelving on both sides with a common back in the center. The more visible high-traffic side could hold cookbooks, while the other side could be for chopping boards, spices and what-not.

4) One side closed (the high-traffic side) and a deep shelf on the other.

5) Pull-out bins with hinges on the bottom front face like the kind on old Hoosier cabinets for flour and potatoes.

6) Do nothing and just leave it as dead space.

At this point in the whole never-ending kitchen project number 6 is looking really good. Decisions, decisions, decisions…




Here's a winter time photo some might be able to relate to. There are 2 legs underneath the two fur balls.

Leg Warmers – (C)Old House Style