one huge and pretty project

Remember this? I showed you my kitchen several months ago. We had remodeled and worked so hard on it and it looked fabulous...except for the furniture piece in the middle. I told you that we planned to refinish it, well, this week we did it.


Here it is in it's original state. It was brown stained and had a wine rack. The side with my blender had a shelf, but we took it out to fit stuff in. We never figured out what to do with the wine rack, cause we don't drink, so that was wasted space.





The top was also too low for me to really do any work on. I rarely used it, except to serve stuff. But we found this old butcher block piece at a builder's discard place and I snapped it up. Now, this thing weighs almost 150lbs, and takes two men to move it. It has been sitting in my laundry room for almost a year, until we found something to put it on. But we found the little island in December. Not a good month for refinishing things outside, so we waited until now. Trip #1 to Home Depot for the paint (and we locked ourselves out of the house).



We were going to sand it down, but in the end it need to be stripped. Trip #2 to Home Depot for stripper. The hubby bought some nasty smelling stuff and sprayed it on. The little white patch at the top is our test spot to see if it was taking the poly off. Yes!





We sanded the base a little so that it would be able to take paint. We could have stripped this too, but that would have taken FOREVER, so we just sanded the top layer of stain down. We also removed the wine rack, and I found the shelf that we originally took out.


Here is the man with his power sander. He was really excited to finally be able to use his power tools that I got him for Christmas. Stupid thing doesn't come with sand paper, though. Trip #3 to Home Depot for sand paper.

So we moved it back inside to paint. I used two coats of primer and just sat and listened to music while I painted. Like my fancy dropcloth? An old sheet with flowers. Oh, I painted one coat, and then hubby painted the second coat. He noticed that while we were pounding out the wine rack, we loosened the side panel. Trip #4 to Home Depot for the right tool to put it back together.

Two coats of WildHoney Paint from Behr. Looking good, right? Then I mixed some of the leftover Chocolate Sprinkle paint I had leftover from my door project with some water and did a faux finish. I painted it on with a brush and wiped it off with a paper towel. Easy peasy. The hard part was lifting the block on top of the base. My FIL and hubby huffed and puffed and got it on there. They even got out the tape measure and made sure it was centered.

Trip #5 to the hardware store was actually to Lowes to get a pretty applique for the front. I found a really cool one for $6 and painted it up like the base and hot glued it on. Makes it look all French country and fancy, right? We put the shelf back in and I put my big appliances in it.

I can't tell you how excited I am about how it turned out. I made brownies on it this morning and it was so nice not to be facing the wall to prep cook. I hate looking at my cabinets while I chop things.

So, this is pretty much what I spent last week doing. I am so proud that it turned out the way I imagined it. Not just ok, or average, but exactly the look I was going for when I dreamed all this up. And- if I can do it, you can do it.