Almost all of us here believe that the best thing to happen to a kitchen in the past ten years is a kitchen island with drawers. One person disagrees and thinks everyone has been brainwashed by Ikea and forgotten that an island is, and always was, an inconvenient thing to trip over. Allowance is made for this voice at meetings. It has never persuaded anyone.
We’re too busy patting ourselves on the back over the drawer that stores every baking tray standing up like little soldiers instead of stacked perilously in a teetering tower that dumps its contents all over your feet when you reach for the bottom tray. Enough trays tumbled out that way to convert three of us to the cause. One held out for eleven years on the old plan chest style baking tray rack alone.
Stubbornness.
They finally gave in and now won’t stop boasting about it.
That’s tedious too but in the other direction.
Nobody tells you how quickly it becomes the operational hub of the household rather than a bit of furniture. Kids homework gets done on it, passports are photocopied over it. Wine bottles are opened leaning dangerously on it. One of the partners’ laptops lives permanently on the end that faces the plug socket even if it entirely ruins the purpose of said end. The storage element of it gets filled within a couple of weeks. Drawer for cutlery? Yes. Still roughly full that one. The big deep cupboard underneath that was probably supposed to be for pans is now home to a waffle maker we’ve used twice in four years and several tea towels nobody irons.
The dissenting voice, when you listen to them down enough drinks, doesn’t actually complain about storage, but traffic instead. And they’re kind of right about that. Island in a galley kitchen? You’ve just created a deluxe bumpingfest. Two of us have watched guests crab sideways round the corner on that one during dinner parties while balancing hot pans and said nothing because we were laughing too hard.
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You measure your kitchen space for an island twice, have an extremely loud argument with the resident cynic, then measure it once more.
That’s where we are as kitchen island team rules.
The thing nobody mentions when enthusing about kitchens with islands is the sound they make.
Sturdy ones with soft-close drawers and shelves sound pretty much silent when you’re clipping around the kitchen. Until one of the hinges on a drawer wears out and bang goes the peaceful kitchen, now filled with the soundtrack of said drawer slamming itself open like it’s offended you didn’t use it for a day. Ours started doing this about two years in. Easily fixed. Will still bring it up in meetings like we betrayed them by allowing it to happen.
The islands-all-the-way debate continues. With or without storage, we still all love ours, and the dissenter can still be heard shouting about death by island every meeting. We let them. It saves us buying them therapy and to be fair they’re not wrong, they’re just outnumbered.
