Islands in the Kitchen

Sing it with me, Dolly:

Islands in the Kitchen
That is what I build
No one's up with me
Why's this take so long?

Chris and I almost never get each other gifts. If we need something, we get it, but we're both of the mindset that we really don't need much. But this year, I decided to be different, and hopefully not in the "Watch this; I'm about to do something stupid" way.

When her family came for Thanksgiving, we moved our old (pre-children) dinner table to the kitchen to give us a little more space to work. This is what it looked like:


Useful, but not the most aesthetically pleasing. And what's more, Aaron would put his fingers in the leaves and then lift them up. I thought a proper kitchen island would be nice, but one on wheels so that we can move it out of the way if we want to, and definitely one with no drop leaf (and locking wheels at that so Aaron can't push it into the dishwasher). After too much time surfing the web for kitchen islands, and several clandestine trips to furniture stores (see, Chrispea, it didn't really take me an hour and a half to do the grocery shopping that day), I decided on a model. Assembly required.

A little while later, two boxes arrived. Their contents were as below:


Attaching the glider guides for the drawers was the most difficult part, because the screws heads were smaller than the guide mounting holes. Idiots! But it gave me the chance to improvise. A few new holes drilled and the screws held the glider guides in just fine.


Here it is with the side panels, with the guides in place, attached to the butcher block. So far it just looks like an oddly designed table, but we'll press on.


The next thing to assemble was the drawer. It was uneventful, so I only took a picture of the final product:

At this point, you might ask, "But what covers the island on the back side of the drawer?" If you were actually asking that, please seek help. As it turns out, the cover for the back is a fake drawer. If we wish to be highfalutin' about it, we can call it a tiroir faux, but I think that'd be too much. I don't understand the purpose of the fake drawer. Nobody can remember which end is the real drawer and which end is the fake, so you wind up pulling on the fake drawer until you break something. The kids do this with some of the fake drawers in the bathroom all the time, and now we have a broken fake drawer up there. It's simply a stupid idea. How about just a panel with no hardware?

But I didn't design it, I'm just assembling, so I put the fake drawer on, with its stupid handle, the cabinet doors, the lower cross-pieces, the casters, and the towel racks (which really looked nice to me with the wooden brackets and metal bars). It's starting to look like a real piece of furniture now, except for the upside-down-ness.

Fortunately, the next step is to turn the thing upright. Now the drawer can go in, and the shelves, and the cabinet doors on the other side --- which are not faux. They open and are useful.


The last step is hard to see from the picture -- installing the magnets so the doors open and close properly, but they're in there, I guarantee it. Voilà, it's finished! It looks just like the one in the instructions. The real drawer goes in and out smoothly. The doors open and close easily. And it rolls.

I am done. Except, well, it's kinda... You see, it's a kitchen island, and this room is clearly not the kitchen. Let me explain. Everyone was asleep upstairs, and the family room is the farthest from the staircase, and farthest from all the ears of the sleeping people. I couldn't trust myself to do this quietly, so the family room had to be my center of operations.

But wouldn't it be cool if, when Chris came downstairs and walked into the kitchen the next morning, she would see this? That's what I thought. All I had to do was pick it up, carry it up the couple of steps between the family room and the living room (where the French doors are), roll it across the living room, the foyer and the dining room, and then into the kitchen. Piece of cake, right? Well, for one thing, it's heavy and awkward, but I got it up the steps. Going across the rooms wasn't too bad; I just had to keep it on only two casters while going across some area rugs.

Then I got to the kitchen doors. The island was too wide -- not the entire thing, though, just the top. Now, I know a thing or two about trigonometry and solid geometry, so I thought I could just pick it up and bring it in on an angle. It turns out that's not so easy to do by oneself at three o'clock in the morning, especially if waking the rest of the house is to be avoided. (In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. -- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut, maybe.) I picked it up, butcher block side up against my chest, and tried to finagle it into the kitchen. It wasn't easy. In fact, it was so not easy that it didn't go in.

In a rare moment of common sense, I thought to myself, "Tim, if you keep at it, you will do something stupid. Let it go until tomorrow." The island remained overnight in the dining room, right next to the doorway to the kitchen.

The sun came up the next morning, and Chris saw the island. I think she liked it but the first things she said about it were:

1. It's big.
2. That I probably spent more on it than she would have.
3. The old table in there was just fine.
4. Will it actually fit through the doorway?

So much for my hopes of an ecstatic look from Chris with "It's wonderful! I've always dreamed of an island in the kitchen. Zoe and Talia are right, you are the best ever!" Issues one through three are the reasons we don't buy each other gifts in the first place, so let's skip them, and concentrate on number four. I took a second look at the problem, and thought that if the top comes off easily, I can wheel it through and do the reattachment in the kitchen. That turned out to be the case, and six wood screws later, we had this:

I am pretty certain that Chris actually likes the island quite a bit, but I'm still waiting for my big thank-you hug and kiss.