My old kitchen island makeover

After the bookshelf I decided the next thing to tackle was a kitchen island makeover (and peninsula too). I knew something eye-popping would really help get the house sold quickly.

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I saw this cool product and wanted to give it a try- Airstone. The marketing said if you can ice a cupcake, you can use Airstone… well here’s the thing… I can’t ice a cupcake. Do you think I let that stop me?! Nah!

The island was a labor of love. When we moved in, I tried to crackle paint it and it was a disaster! Let me just tell you, over the years I have learned FAR more by failure than by success. I know quite a bit about paint now…. mostly because I have screwed up a LOT! Case in point:

Don’t you want to buy a house with an island like this? ICK….

Here’s a great tip: if you try crackle and it doesn’t work, just stop. Strip it all off and start over. You can NOT add more paint to cover it up. It WILL keep crackling. You can’t sand it to get it off…. the process of sanding heats everything back up and it cracks all over again… just sayin’ I may know “someone” who tried this method and please let me just save you some heartache….

so I bit the bullet and pulled the island apart:

and started stripping the parts I needed to:

Paint strippers are generally pretty highly toxic and gross chemicals. I avoid using them whenever I can. I went researching and managed to find (and use) this great product I found online called HomeStrip. It was developed in the UK (and they have since launched in the US rebranded as MaxStrip).

It hardly had any smell at all and worked wonderfully. It was just slightly more labor intensive than the typical toxic chemical strippers, but I felt worth that extra effort to not make my family sick or have a horrific headache when I was done.

When all was complete, I had this:

ok, on to the far more fun stuff… I pulled out that Airstone. This product was a DIYer’s dream! It went on so easy- spread the adhesive on the back with a putty knife, (sorry, I was an idiot and have no pictures of this) and stick it to the cabinet wall. The product cuts with a hacksaw (or in my case, my Ryobi Job Plus tool- WAY easier) and boom!

Yes, there are even corner pieces for the sides that wrap around- it’s SO easy. I did the whole island and the back of the peninsula. Then I painted the bottom cabinets in the kitchen in Shabby Paint Garfield Gray (a nice medium charcoal tone) and the tops in White Ice (a gray-toned white).  It made the entire space seem larger and even cleaner.

Oh! the best part? Our real estate agent was completely horrified I had painted the cabinets two different colors. He was pretty rude about it actually… but the house sold to the first people who saw it. Can you guess why? Yep, the kitchen… CRAZY, right?!

The lighting was terrible and all work was done until the wee hours of the morning so I am so very sorry for the low light pictures.