oops I made drawers. and trimmy bits.

I haven't posted any pics of the island from the other side, because 'til now there hasn't been anything to see except plumbing stubs and the empty 36" Ikea cab where the sink is gonna live. I hauled in the shiny new Bosch dishwasher from the garage and slid it into place (still not hooked up though), and finished making the little trim pieces on the sides. Those are part of my "didn't realize how wide the island would be" screw up- they cover the 2x4's that I didn't originally realize would be there. Lucky (again) for me, I had three really huge pieces of veneered mahogany with horizontal grain (around 92"x26") which were intended as side trim for the big cabs, but as you can see below, two of them only need to go from the counter top to the top of the cabs, leaving me with a lot of extra for these island trims (I cut and mounted the one below today as well). I'm waiting on the other big trim pieces, because I decided to swap the plastic legs for metal ones on the super huge cab that will contain the gas and microwave oven... that cab weighs over 100 lbs empty, and it's about to get some heavy mahogany laminate/MDF side pieces, and oh yeah, I'm gonna stick two ovens in there, so the rinky Ikea plastic legs are seeming like a poor idea. I have to remove the cab to swap the legs, so I'm holding off on mounting the trim pieces.

Getting back to the lonely island, all the woodwork is essentially done (except toe kicks), and I'm REAL happy about that, because it was a lot of work. It's not like building a pre-fab piece of furniture with holes drilled and everything magically aligning. This was a lot of measuring, cutting, re-cutting, clamping things so they go together correctly when you assemble them. Way more work than it probably looks like. BTW, I don't know what those dots are in the pic, but they don't exist in real life.

In other island-ic news, I was a little concerned about where to locate the switch for the garbage disposal. There wasn't a really good place to put one, but John told me about how his father's place has a button that looks like an arcade game button on top of the counter- press once for on and once for off. This struck me odd as an electrical button by water would be a fairly bad idea, but after researching it, I discovered that it's an "air button". They have a little remote box that sends a little stream of air through a tube to where the button is; this way there's no power near the water. I intend to have them make an extra hole in the counter near the back of the sink for it- I ordered one today off Amazon for around $50, 'tis HERE if you want to witness the hotness.

Moving along, I spent the evening building drawers:


I never thought I'd see solid mahogany veneer all over, but alas, there it is (the empty spaces in the big one on the left are where aforementioned gas and microwave ovens will live). The drawers are relatively easy to build once you get the hang of Ikea's sort of weird hardware. The good news is the sides are metal and the bottoms are thick particleboard, so they're pretty robust. They also have the nifty slides that pull in as it closes.

In yet more exciting news, with the island pretty much done, I stopped by Lowe's yesterday and ordered my counters. I had planned on doing Corian, aka solid-surface plastic, and they're having a killer sale on LG Hi-Macs, which is essentially the same thing (Dupont's patent on Corian recently ran out). This kind of thing is usually around $65/sq ft installed, the Lowe's sale price is $36.99/sq ft, so I jumped on it- the sale is over at the end of the month, so I was sort of racing to finish the island in time. I already made them a diagram, they estimated and I paid, but they're supposed to be sending someone over to precisely measure, then they come back around a week later to install. The color is "cotton dust" and looks like below, though the sample I have looks a little less "busy".

In even more exciting house news, I'm having two sliding glass doors installed next week- the one on the side of the house is being replace, plus John and I are going to demo the bay window in back (sorry Kim) and they're installing a big-ass eight-foot wide one in its place. I promise plenty of pics of that destructo mess!