Our kitchen is really small and for years we had a tiny store-bought “island” to get a bit more kitchen space. We decided to build something that perfectly fits our needs. This is a development blog showing some of our process!
Here’s the sketch we started with. We wanted to make something that wrapped around a corner. It overhangs some carpet. I convinced my partner we should “iterate” by slapping together a scaffold, putting it in-situ and then having a look + feel about the use of space.
Here’s the first pass. No cuts to wood, just some feeling it out:
With some rough feeling of size cut some pieces down (and also used a hodge-podge of off-cuts from another gridkit project to hold some parts in place while finalizing remaining cuts):
The gridkit team were really helpful and pointed us to some bits we could use for nice feet on this surface:
We bought a cheap peace of timber from Bunnings and had them cut it to rectangular size, then hand-sawed out the corner to make it an L. Sanded it and slapped some oil on it:
Slapping the benchtop in place we were able to start using the island (even before all the shelves were in place, or the top was nailed down - notice towel in place for friction to stop it sliding around)
This was super important because we realised it was 40mm too high for my partner. Changing that was super easy with gridtkit!
We also realised we needed more of an over-hang - the corner posts were a bit in the way. Again, really easy to change. VERY glad we took an iterative approach, because we never would have foreseen all the needs / desires till we started using the setup.
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We moved on to shelves. These were just 12mm ply that we had Bunnings cut down. Hand-sawed the notches need (found that adding some candle-wax to sides of the blade that cutting was much smoother.
Here’s the finished project:
The increase in functional bench-space to our kitchen has been amazing. AND storage space. We have some open questions about the finishing of the bench-top, and how it will wear over time. None of those feel that troubling though because everything is just parts. If we decide we want some fancier wood, or to try a different finish, we just swap it out later!
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