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Hello Live Laugh Rowe readers!
My name is Robin and I am so excited to share a guest post with you all today!

I blog over at Garage Sales R Us where I share with everyone my experiences and the amazing things I find each week. I also love to show everyone what I do with the things I find. I love to upcycle furniture. I just finished with a dresser and two night stands I found at a garage sale for $15 dollars! Click Here for that project.

I also love to show off the fashion I find at garage sales and
second hand stores through my Fashion on a Dimes and Kid’s Corner.

My total outfit cost is $17.50!

Click here to find out where I bought it.

Paisley’s total outfit cost is $2.25!
Click here to see where I bought it.

Today I will be sharing with you my latest project. I just recently completed our Kitchen Renovation and will be sharing with you how we made over our island for about $150 dollars. Make sure to go check out the rest of my kitchen renovation HERE.

I am SO mad at myself! I was so excited to get started on the island that I completely spaced the before picture. All the island was was some unfinished MDF board on the three sides and then my cabinets on the back of the island. Here is the best before picture I could find of the island. This was a little family birthday we threw my daughter Jaysa when she turned three.

Got to love her Goofy face!

To begin with the island I found three of these stair case posts at the Restore for $9 dollars a piece. The Restore is basically a Good Will for building materials. There is most likely one in your area!

A friend gave me the idea of turning the posts upside down to use them as pillars on my island. I loved the idea so I bought them. After getting online to see how much these cost I was blown away. Lowes.com carries a post that is similar that costs about $40.00 a piece! If I had bought 3 posts new at the store they would have cost me around $120 dollars instead of the $30 I spent at the Restore!

After bringing them home we cut them to the right size so they would fit snug under my island. You want them really snug so that you can hammer them in with a rubber mallet and not need to use glue to adhere them. The posts were a little lighter than I wanted them to be so I sanded them down and restained them a darker color. 150 grit sand paper is what I have found to be the best when sanding off a finish.

It took me FOREVER but I was still happy to be saving $90 dollars!

If you are using stair case posts chances are there will be small holes where they were attached to the banister of the staircase. Fill those holes with wood filler and sand them down to make sure they are even and ready for staining.

After that we headed to Home Depot to get everything else we needed to complete the island. We bought a 1/4 inch think wood board that was stainable and had it cut right there in the store.

Then we bought a wainscotting bead board that is assembled a lot like wood flooring. The pieces click into each other are are really easy to put together. To be honest I wasn’t the biggest fan of this stuff. I felt like it was a little bit cheap. It chipped easily and I had to touch up the ends and seal it really good with my final gloss coat.

These were $12.27 per box. The price tag was perfect but you definately got what you paid for. In the end after painting and getting a protective coat on them I think they will hold up just fine.

We bought some trim to frame out the beadboard. Our trim was .92 cents per ft. We also bought some roped wood trim that would help tie in the island with my cabinets. The roped wood trim were 8 ft. long at $12.22 a piece so we spent a little over $50 on 4 pieces of roped trim.

When we got home with our supplies I started preping the wood for stain and paint. First I sanded my 1/4 inch board with a really fine 400 grit sand paper. I did this because my board felt like it had some splintery fuzzies on it. I know thats a bit of an oxymoron but thats exactly what it felt like. It felt like the board had the smallest thinest splinters on it that were not strong enough to poke you. I didn’t want to take a chance on geting splinters so I sanded it down and the fuzzies came right off. I wanted my 1/4 inch board stained so I used a wood conditioner I found at a garage sale for .25 cents to prep the wood. To be really honest If I had not found this at a garage sale for so cheap I would have skipped this step. But, since I have it I might as well use it!.

After letting that dry I applied my stain with a pair of latex gloves. (I paid $1.50 for a box of latex gloves at a garage sale, which makes staining so much easier!) I used an English oak stain that was a medium brown. My 1/4 inch board was not the same type of wood as trim pieces so to get my colors to match a little better I ran out and got a dark walnut stain, which is just one shade darker and gave my board a few coats of that to help darken it up. I also stained my corner pieces, my rope trim, and my staircase post/kitchen pillars.

Then I went on to painting my bead board and trim. My bead board came out of the package white. I wanted it to match everything else so I painted them the same cream color I used on the cabinets. I laied my trim on the saw horses I bought from a garage sale a few weeks ago for $2.50 a piece. They have already been a major help with projects.

After my bead board and trim were primed and painted I glazed them to give it that distressed look I was going for on my cabinets.

After everything was stained or primed and painted it needed a final protctive coat. For the bead board and trim I used a Valspar Clear Protector.

When I did my cabinets I did not want them to have a high gloss sheen to them so a Lowes employee told me about a clear protector which would give it more of a matte finish. For the wood rope trim pieces I used a polyurethane I bought at the Restore for $5 dollars.

Because Home Depot could not cut the divets where the cabinets receed and met the kick board. C.J. had to cut our board to make it fit perfectly. He used a perminate marker to draw a line on the back and cut it out with a little hand held saw. He then filed down all the left over shaving on the sides.

After all our wood was stained and painted we were ready to nail everything on. C.J. nailed our 1/4 inch board to the island first. Then he added on the corner piece for the two front edges of the island to give them a finished look

I waited to polyurethane the 1/4 inch boards until they were nailed on so I went back and polyeurethaned them and waited for them to dry. Then we centered the bead board and marked where it needed to be so we could ensure it would stay centered when we started nailing.

Then C.J. cut the trim for all three sides and framed out the bead board.

Next we started adding our roped wood trim to the outside edges on each side of the island and then put the pillars on C.J. made sure to be very excact when cutting these pillars. They can be slide under the bottom of the granite at a slight angle and then hammered with a rubber mallet into place by gently hitting the bottom of the post. If you wanted to attach them with some sort of glue that would be possible. You would just have to wipe away the streak of glue that will form from hammering it over with a rubber mallet.

For the final touch I added a wood scroll to the front of the island.

After being primed, painted, glazed and glossed with the same protective coat I using on the bead board and trim I put a thin layer of wood glue on the back of my wood scroll. We placed the wood scroll in the center of the front of the island and then inconspicuously put a few nails in it to make sure it would not slide down after being glued. We also went back and filled in our holes from our nails with wood glue. In order to hide the wood filler you will have to repaint and re glaze the holes you filled. We spent a total of about $150 on our island.

We went from this MDF board kitchen island

To this beautiful two toned traditional style island.