Bypass The $1,000 Kitchen Islands: Grab Some Paint And Head To The Thrift Store Instead

Adding an island to your kitchen can solve a lot of common problems. It creates precious countertop space for meal prep, freeing up room for additional appliances and decor pieces, while drawers and cabinets below give plenty more storage for utensils, flatware, and dry goods, concentrating these items to the cooking area. An island can even serve as a kitchen table for casual meals and sipping your morning coffee. The cost of adding a one, however, can be prohibitive. Professionally installing a small island typically costs thousands of dollars, and even standalone islands can easily run up a similar bill. But with a trip to the thrift store and a bit of elbow grease, you make yourself a beautiful island for much, much less.

The trick here is starting with a quality dresser — and one of the right height. These can often be found at thrift stores for as little as $50, and require only a few modifications to become a chic centerpiece for your kitchen. Once you've found the ideal dresser and brought it home, all that you really need to do is clean it up, sand it down, and paint it to fit in with your kitchen decor. 

Finding the perfect dresser is critical, as you'll want the small drawers and cabinets in the piece to work with your kitchen equipment. The surface on top is also important, as you'll probably want to finish it differently than the other sides so that it can be used as a nice workspace, and that means finding a dresser made with good wood that can be refinished to be food-prep friendly.

Another option that broadens the scope of suitable thrift store dressers, as well as potential modifications to the piece, is swapping out the top. By replacing this part of the dresser with, say, butcher block or a tiled surface, you can get the kitchen island to match the countertops in the rest of the space. This also opens the door to other furniture pieces that suit your storage needs, but are not made with ideal materials for food prep. Additionally, when adding a new piece of countertop to the dresser, the potential exists to have this overhang on one side of the island, creating space to nest stools underneath for a casual dining area.

Beyond the practical benefits of maximizing kitchen island usage, building your own piece out of thrift store furniture also invites an opportunity to really dive into decorative elements. Swapping out the drawer pulls for something more elegant and in line with your kitchen design can help the piece seamlessly blend into the space. Similarly, simple additions like painting floral patterns onto the tile both disguise the previous use of the furniture and give lots of rustic charm.

Kitchen renovations are an expensive undertaking, but clever hacks like this show how inexpensive it can be to improve your culinary space, if you are willing to put in a little bit of work yourself. Designers may be skipping kitchen islands more frequently, but it turns out that the perfect design element may just be waiting for you at your local thrift store.