Discovered these on Cork Floor Tiles

Creating a unique kitchen island is a great DIY project that will add valuable storage and design to your kitchen. A custom DIY kitchen island can also add additional work surface to a small kitchen, create a designer look in a plain kitchen, and even pull double duty as another eating area. Basically creating a custom DIY kitchen island is a win win situation no matter how you look at it. Here are some ideas for creating a custom kitchen island for all of you DIY people out there!

An old dress is a great way to create a custom DIY kitchen island without having to do a lot of carpentry. Look for a dresser that fits you kitchen. This should be easy to do since there are thousands of styles and sizes out there. Next, you will want to make sure you dresser is near counter height, can easily be made counter height, or you that have some means to get it to counter height. A quick way to make an old dresser the perfect DIY kitchen island height is to add castor to the legs. This will add height and make your custom DIY kitchen island mobile. You can find all types of castors and wheel at any home improvement store as well as online. Measure the difference between your counter and your dresser and aim for buying wheels that will make up this difference. This is the easiest way to turn a dresser into a custom DIY kitchen island. For added protection coat your dresser with two layers of wood wax. You could also paint on a couple layers of polyurethane. This will allow you to wipe down you custom DIY kitchen island when necessary. If your dresser is too tall you could cut the legs off to make it shorter.

An old dining table is a great option for making a custom DIY kitchen island. Most dining tables are going to need some additional height to bring them up to the height of a kitchen island. Castors and wheel are again a great option to adding height to your custom kitchen island. You could also add fence finials screwed into the bottom of the dining table legs to add height. This would be especially useful if you do not want your DIY kitchen island to be able to roll. Try adding trunks underneath for additional storage. If your table permits you could add shelving underneath for more storage as well.

Another great custom DIY kitchen island project that would require little or no carpentry is to take old wooden trunks and stack them to make them counter height. Lay a thick piece of beveled glass or a large slab of granite on top to create a work surface. You won’t be able to access the inside of the trunks anymore, but the look would be an amazing custom DIY kitchen island. For extra storage you could at screw on hooks and bars with S hooks on the side to hang spoons, pots, and dish towels.

An old door is a great start to creating a custom DIY kitchen island. All you need to do is find some great old legs or order some new ones online. Attach them to your old door, add a few layers of the protective wood wax and you are ready to start cooking. Leave on the old hardware for a custom DIY look that will have everyone talking about your cool kitchen island at your next get together.

You'd be surprised how much you can do when you put your mind to it. There are home improvement projects you can take on with very little help from educational resources or anyone else. But if you need someone's help, you don't have to hire an expensive expert. Learn the various ways you can get inexpensive help for the home improvement projects you've been promising yourself for years.

1. Your local hardware store will most likely have books of all kinds from fixing the roof to building your own porch. These manuals more often than not cover everything from whether or not you need a building permit to the preparations you need to make before you start building. These are very important things to know if you are going to do a project yourself. That way, you make fewer mistakes and you definitely don't make the kinds of mistakes that might cause you to have to tear your home improvement project apart and start over.
2. Find your materials from home improvement or home building projects that are taking place in your town or the local area. I know of contractors who charge for hauling, and then those same contractors use the excess materials they have hauled for other projects they have been hired to do. When you approach the home owner or the business owner who is paying for the building project, you just may find yourself with a magnificent deal that might include you hauling away the excess materials for free. Then, you have free materials for your own home improvement project.
3. Contact your local high schools to hire the experts you need. When you are doing your own home improvement project, you may only need some help and it would be great if your help had some knowledge of the building process. If you contact your local high schools, you might be able to find a vocational technology department where you can ask the teacher to allow you to get in contact with a few students they recommend. If you do your project in the summer, in the evenings, or on the weekend, you just may be able to find yourself a knowledgeable person who can help you with your home improvement project.
4. Contact local contractors who may have just laid people off because of the tight economy. It doesn't mean that the person who was laid off isn't knowledgeable in home improvement. It just means that a contract had to make cuts for the benefit of the rest of the company. You might be able to find yourself a very appreciative home improvement expert to help you do the job you've been promising yourself for years.

We normally look for help in the normal ways. But when money is tight, creative ideas start flowing. When you have a home improvement project that you would like to complete, you don't have to spend massive amounts of money for a home improvement expert in your area. There are ways to save money and help others in the process.

When New York's Museum of Modern Art re-opened in late 2004, after spending a reported $850 million dollars, laying off defenseless staffers, and loaning out its masterpieces for hefty rentals, I expected to see something worth all our money. What a surprise!

First you entered a completely bare gray and white lobby with all the charm of a deportation center. Four years later, it's still that way. Up a few steps and you're in a tall glassed-in area overlooking the central garden. Here, you think, are the first signs of intelligence: a central orientation point for each floor with a big staircase always opening onto the garden, whatever floor you're on. Think again. The big staircase only goes up one half floor, then stops. To get anywhere, you are herded into a tight, windowless space exactly like the back of a strip mall, with rumbling, crowded escalators that open onto nothing but more rumbling, crowded escalators.

OK, now you're up to the fourth and fifth floors, home to the permanent collection, that famous pile of modernist masterpieces from Cezanne to Picasso to Rothko. You walk around each floor, and eventually, something horrifying begins to sink in. After spending $850 million, MoMA's “greatly expanded” new building has no more (and quite possibly less) of its permanent collection on display than its last renovation of 1983. And everywhere, oppressive crowds. Back then, that was surely due to the building's newness. But now, it's just as crowded, and finally you realize why: MoMA has shockingly little art on display in shockingly cramped areas, all with the same look: monotonous white walls and noisy bare oak floors. The contrast with the sprawling, relaxed, varied, warm, and fascinating Metropolitan Museum across town couldn't be starker.

On my first visit, I glimpsed something I wasn't supposed to. When you enter the fourth floor, devoted to the permanent collection after 1940, you sweep through a small room on your way to the first big room. In this catbox, a bottleneck everyone must squeeze through, MoMA chose to put Andrew Wyeth's figurative masterpiece “Christina's World,” an icon of the 20th century. As I passed the poor dissed orphan, shaking my head, I noticed a door had been left ajar. Inside was a vast unfinished space in raw concrete. To my astonishment, the original 1939 alabaster-panel front façade, hidden behind drywall for decades, had been exposed and you could see the light of 53rd street coming through the stone. I was looking at the entire fourth and fifth floors of the original MoMA, and the space was still unfinished. I e-mailed the press office: where's the rest of the fourth and fifth floors? Where's the rest of your permanent collection? Back came the snotty reply: no plans to finish those floors; no need to. No need to?! That raw space would DOUBLE the permanent art on two floors, with entire new rooms for individual artists. Somebody at MoMA is a complete moron.

Here's my modest proposal to make MoMA work again. It's in two stages. First, finish the fourth and fifth floors, and double the space available for the masterpieces of MoMA's permanent collection. Second, move ALL the offices, workshops, education services, library, and storage to the new skyscraper MoMA is planning to build just down the block on a vacant lot they own, connected to the rest of MoMA by a passage. With all their staffing demands satisfied on the lower floors of that new building, the rest of MoMA would now be opened, front to back, end to end, for nothing but contiguous art space, to become the truly expansive museum we thought we were getting. And at either end of the central garden would be the two tall glassed-in orientation points, with grand staircases ascending to all floors, and escalators and elevators opening onto the garden view: a proper, intelligent circulation pattern any other public building could have managed, but MoMA didn't.