Kitchen Island {Ikea Hack}

**If you would like to know more details about this project, including a cost breakdown and materials used, please visit the follow up post. **

Last week, I shared how we DIY'd our mudroom using Ikea Hemnes shelving.  Today I am going to share yet another one of our projects that started with some Ikea products.  For this one, we took down the wall between our kitchen and living room to create one large space.  Once our family room addition was finished, no one was ever in the living room so it made sense to open it up to the kitchen.   We had to keep a support column so we decided to build a room divider type "island".  In order to remove the wall, we had to add a support beam.  Then we built a half wall to support the bookshelves.  We used Ikea Billy bookcases (3) to create storage on the kitchen side.  We topped it with a butcher block countertop (called Numerar), also from Ikea.

This section is where I keep most of my baking supplies and part of my collection of cookbooks.     And you can also see my BIG bottle of Nielsen Massey vanilla extract.  That's the good stuff.  No other vanilla compares.

The living room side has a couple of stools and beadboard to finish it off.  It seems one of my boys is always perched on these stools doing homework or surfing the internet while chatting with me in the kitchen.  We covered the support column with some trim.  It is great to have the outlets right there to charge laptops and iPads.

We purchased the corbels from Lowes unfinished and painted them.

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I hung this wire basket on the other side and it has been super convenient for holding paper plates and lunch bags for the kids.  I bought the basket at Homegoods and recently saw that they still had them in stock in the aisle with all the baskets.

Come to think of it, I haven't been to Ikea in months.  We love walking around there and brainstorming projects...and the meatballs aren't bad either!  Come see the rest of our kitchen here!

****If you'd like more details about the process we used to complete this project, check out this update post!!