My Current Obsession

I am currently obsessed with Ana White.  This Alaska lady has an entire blog dedicated to putting out easy plans for people to build their own furniture.  How empowering, right?  Get some tools!  Build a table!  And most of the "do-ers" are women, traditionally not the tool-buying, table-building demographic.  She and other guests post plans and then people post their "brag blogs" about what they built and how it turned out and it usually turns our magnificently.

We're getting ready to move into my parent's OKC house for about a year and while we're there we're going to get things fixed up and ready to sell.  One of our projects is an island for the massive kitchen.  We also need to repaint the cabinets (after removing several layers of paint), change out the hardware, replace the nasty old carpet, replace the dishwasher, and perhaps replace the stove and oven.  But after all that...then we want to add an island.  But we won't want to spend a lot of money.  So we can build one!  I popped "kitchen island" into the search bar at ana-white.com and come up with these beauties.

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The first one's actually a counter-height craft table, but I think it would make a stupendous island.  We'll paint the island the same color as the cabinets and probably top it with a butcher block countertop from Ikea.

We also will need a desk.  We have an inherited computer desk that works well but is U-G-L-Y and extremely awkward to move.  When we moved to Atlanta I made S promise me that this was the LAST time we would move this desk.  Goodbye ugly desk!

But S will be in grad school and I'll be getting ready for grad school so we need some sort of desk set up.  I know!  Let's build one!  Ana?

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I like the first two because they could be reincarnated as something else someday - a console table, an entry table, etc.  I like the last one because it's beautiful.

But if we build a desk with less storage then we need a place to put everything that we currently store in out ugly desk.  I know!

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Don't you love that color?  And the filing cabinet-inspired details?

All together now...

Can we build it?

YES WE CAN!