How we built a bespoke-looking kitchen island for under £300 – and it's become one of our proudest renovating achievements
After receiving hugely expensive quotes, we took things into our own hands
Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.
If you read Part 1, you’ll know the perimeter of our kitchen came together using GoodHome cabinets from B&Q, a few clever in-frame tricks, and roughly £5,000 of patience. Today we’re tackling the part of the kitchen people ask about even more than the perimeter: the island.
The ochre, beadboard-clad, slightly-improbable island that sits in the middle of the room and quietly does the heavy lifting of everyday life. We built it ourselves – frame, panels, paint and all – for under £300, excluding the worktop and the integrated fridge and freezer hidden inside it.
It is, hand on heart, one of the proudest things we’ve made in this house.
Why we built it rather than bought it
We looked at off-the-shelf islands. We looked at made-to-measure islands. Neither did what we needed.
We wanted something big enough to seat four on one side, with a fully integrated fridge and freezer hidden on the other side, and a finish that matched the rest of the kitchen without being matchy-matchy. The quotes we were getting back were enormous – and none of them quite hit the brief.
So, as we tend to, we decided to have a crack at it ourselves.
Step 1: The post-it that started it all
Every great design starts with a post-it note sketch. Or at least, ours did.
Before we ordered a single thing, we sketched the layout on a small post-it: a 2200mm long island, with 400mm drawer cabinets at each end, and a 600mm under-counter freezer and 600mm under-counter fridge tucked into the middle. Total internal width: 2000mm of cabinetry, with a bit of breathing room either side once the end panels went on.
It looked ridiculous. It was also genuinely how we worked it out. We’ve learned over three renovations that you don’t need fancy CAD software to plan something like this – you just need to know your appliance sizes, your cabinet sizes, and roughly how the whole thing wants to sit in the room.
Step 2: Positioning the units and building the timber frame
We started by positioning the two B&Q drawer cabinets and the under-counter fridge and freezer in their final spots on the floor, levelling them carefully on their adjustable feet. Once we were happy with the alignment, we built a simple timber frame around the outside – essentially a skeleton that would hold the decorative panels and tie the whole thing together as one piece of furniture rather than four separate appliances.
The frame is built from standard PSE (planed square edge) softwood from the timber merchant. Nothing fancy. We used a mitre saw to cut everything to length, mitre glue and a set square to get the corners square, and quick-grip clamps to hold the frame steady while the glue went off.
A few things that made a real difference here:
- Get the cabinets perfectly level first. Adjustable feet are your friend. If the cabinets aren’t level, nothing you build around them will look right.
- Build the frame slightly proud of the cabinets at the front, not tight against them. You need to allow enough depth for the cabinet doors / drawers to sit flush with the finished end panels.
- Mitre glue is genuinely brilliant. It bonds in seconds and gives you a strong, clean corner without screws showing.
Step 3: The beadboard panels (and the window-frame trick)
Once the timber frame was up, we needed to fill in the panels. We went for MDF beadboard, which we bought in big sheets and cut to size – it gives that lovely tongue-and-groove cottage look without the cost or the faff of fitting individual planks.
Here’s the bit we’re quite pleased with. To hold the beadboard panels neatly inside the timber frame, we used something called glass bead moulding – the slim, rounded timber bead you’d normally use to hold a pane of glass into a window frame. We mitred it at the corners, sat the beadboard panel inside the frame, and then nailed the bead moulding in around the edges to lock the panel in place.
It does two jobs at once: it holds the panel firmly, and it adds a beautiful little shadow line around each panel that makes the whole thing look like proper joinery rather than DIY. A nail gun (we use a Ryobi cordless one) makes this part fast and clean. Hammer and panel pins work too, just slower.
We then continued the same beadboard treatment all the way around the back of the island – the side where the stools sit. This is the side most people see when they walk into the room, so it was worth the extra effort. A blank MDF back would have given it away as flat-pack-furniture-in-disguise instantly.
Step 4: Painting it (and the colour we matched)
With the construction done, the whole island looked like a raw timber skeleton with white MDF panels – not exactly the showstopper we’d been picturing. Paint was where it came to life.
We chose Dulux Heritage Brushed Gold, which is a warm, ochre-leaning mustard that we’d been circling for months. Because it’s not technically a furniture paint, we had it colour-matched into a Valspar durable furniture paint – that gave us the colour we wanted and the hard-wearing finish we needed for something that gets knocked, leaned on, and wiped down daily.
Three coats, applied with a small foam roller for the flat areas and a soft brush for the beaded grooves. We sanded lightly between coats with a fine-grit paper to keep the finish smooth.
A tip if you’re painting beadboard: load the brush lightly and work the paint into the grooves first, then roll over the flat surface. If you go in roller-first, you end up with drips pooling in the grooves and a textured mess that takes ages to fix.
Step 5: The temporary worktop (we kind of loved it)
While we waited for the right worktop deal to come along, we needed something to use in the meantime. So we cut a sheet of plywood to size, sat it on top of the cabinets, and painted it in a hard-wearing multi-surface paint in a soft off-white.
Honestly? We liked it. More than we expected to. There’s a charm to a painted ply worktop – it’s slightly imperfect, slightly rustic, and it cost almost nothing. We genuinely debated keeping it for a while.
If you’re mid-renovation and your dream worktop is months away, this is a brilliant placeholder that’s actually pleasant to live with rather than an embarrassment to hide.
Step 6: The worktop splurge (and a 40% saving)
The worktop was the one thing we’d always planned to spend on. We’d been quietly stalking Minerox quartz for ages – specifically Calacatta Gold Superior, which has soft, warm veining that picks up the ochre of the island and the terracotta of the floor without competing with either.
We held our nerve, kept the ply in place, and waited. When the 40% off offer finally came through, we jumped on it. Worth every minute of the wait.
One small detail that we’re glad we stood our ground on: we chose a bullnose edge, which gives a soft, rounded profile to the worktop edge. The salesman tried to talk us out of it – apparently it’s “old fashioned and not really done anymore”. Which was, of course, exactly why we wanted it.
In a cottage, with terracotta tiles underfoot and beams overhead, a sharp modern square edge would have looked completely wrong. The bullnose feels timeless and slightly traditional, which is exactly the point.
What we’d say to anyone thinking about doing the same
- Start with a sketch. Post-it note optional. Sketch your appliance widths, your cabinet widths, and your total length before you order anything. It’s the quickest way to spot a problem.
- Don’t be intimidated by the framing. A timber skeleton around standard flat-pack cabinets is one of the most achievable DIY upgrades you can make. If you can use a mitre saw and a set square, you can do this.
- Use glass bead moulding for the panels. It’s a tiny detail that does enormous work. The shadow line is what stops your panels looking like they’ve been glued on.
- Wrap the back of the island properly. The side guests see is not the side you want to skimp on.
- Live with a temporary worktop and wait for the right deal. A painted ply worktop is genuinely fine. Don’t panic-buy something you’ll regret.
- Trust your instincts on finishes. If the salesman tells you something is old-fashioned, that might be exactly the reason to choose it.
Standing in the kitchen now – ochre island, grey-green perimeter, terracotta floor running underneath the lot, beams overhead, and a quartz worktop catching the morning light – it’s hard to believe we built the centrepiece of it ourselves for the price of a weekend away.
But we did. And if you’ve been wondering whether you could pull off something similar in your own kitchen, our honest answer is: probably yes. It’s slower than buying. It’s messier than buying. But there’s something about standing at an island you built yourself, making a cup of coffee, that no amount of money can quite replicate.
That’s it for the DIY kitchen diaries – for now, at least. Onto the next room.
