Kitchen island of happiness

The house we stayed at in Tremblant had an amazing butcher block island. I loved having the extra counter space in the middle of the room to chop, cook and plate food. I really missed it when we got home and we started looking for options we could use in our kitchen.

We have a quite a bit of space in the middle of the kitchen with no counter space by the stove (really annoying btw) which made it kind of cumbersome for cooking. We'd have to chop something on one side and drag it over to the other. I tried to find a before pic, but I could only find this to show how much space is in between. You can kind of get the picture.

Anyway we were spoiled by our vacation rental. The thing is that we didn't want to spend a ton of money. The plan is to gut the kitchen in about five years which will include taking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room to build a big island. We wanted something decent quality, affordable, functional and that we could easily sell down the road.

We saw the Stenstorp at Ikea and it met all of the requirements. It was a bit more than we wanted to spend but we loved the clean lines and the fact that it doesn't really look like typical Ikea furniture.

We took a little family trip on Saturday and came home with one!

We love it! We weren't sure if we'd find it annoying that we have to go around something in the middle of the kitchen now to cook or grab something from the fridge but honestly it's like it has always been there. Mark found the little stools on kijiji for $50 and picked them up today. I think we should paint them red.

 I love the stainless steel shelves on the side - I was able to move my cookbooks off the counter giving me even more space to work with.

The only problem is that now that we have the island, I'm looking at the dark in the kitchen and thinking of jumping on the two-tone cupboards bandwagon. It would definitely help to hide stuff like this :).

We'll see!

ps - I apologize for the weird photos - I took these at night with my iphone because I was too lazy to get my regular camera...