I don't know about you, but I've been loving the wood accents in kitchens lately! Especially dark wood. I've seen some beautiful wood islands and peninsulas floating around, and I wanted to see how I could transform our honey oak peninsula into something beautiful as well! Here is how I did it!
P.S. If you want to see how the whole kitchen turned out - click here!
Here is what our peninsula looked like when we moved into our house. It was a pretty basic 90's peninsula.
I really wanted it to be a solid wood panel, but I had to figure out what to do about the door. I gave up the extra storage to be able to have a flat panel look! I found an old piece of MDF in our garage and cut it to size. Then I used my kreg jig to drill pocket holes to create a solid panel.
Next, I used wood veneer to cover the whole front of the peninsula! This way, you could never tell there used to be a door there. The best part about this is you could have an island or peninsula made out of any material and transform it to stainable wood. The veneer is peel and stick, so you just have to cut it to size and stick it onto the surface. I used red oak. I didn't worry about cutting the edges perfectly straight because I covered that with oak 1x4s.
Here is what it looked like after I trimmed it out. I just used my miter saw to cut the wood to size.
For the side panel, I actually decided just to sand it down since I was using the same material (red oak). You can see I originally did 2 panels, but later decided 4 looked better. I trimmed the top, bottom, and sides and then cut the 1x4s to divide it a bit. Next was staining it!
I used Minwax stain in dark walnut and ended up doing 2 passes of the stain to get it a little darker!
Here is how it turned out! It totally transformed the look of our kitchen and I love the warmth it adds!
Let me know if you have any questions!
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