As I am getting in the swing of planning out my Christmas gifts for this year I thought I would share the gift I made for my mom for her birthday/Christmas gift last year. She and her husband were in the final stages of remodeling their kitchen and the last item they needed was a kitchen island so I decided to build it for them as a gift.
I started by repurposing two old cabinets as the foundation for the island. They were different depths so I build out a frame to make it square and then boxed the cabinets in with a sturdy piece of plywood on the back and beadboard on the sides. The hinges to the doors from the cabinet were removed and retrofitted with a rev-a-shelf to allow for easy access to a pull out a garbage and recycling bin. 
On the backside I came up with the idea of making an open bookshelf for my mom to store her cookbooks and other knick-knacks since she already had plenty of seating in her kitchen. I made the posts by taking 2x2s and wrapping them with 1x6s (for the top), 1x10s (for the bottom) and some scrap molding. For the shelf I screwed a ledge into the back of the plywood and attached it to the posts using my Kreg Jig.
To finish it off the holes were patched with wood filler and sanded down. With a few coats of white paint and new hardware it was almost complete. For the top my mom wanted butcher block, so she had a piece of the Ikea Numerar in oak cut to size (I got the leftover scrap for a project for my kitchen) and mounted that for the countertop.
Along the way I wasn't sure if it would come together well and there were a number of frustrating times (including a chop saw that wasn't cutting square and a wrong molding cut that almost made me run short on molding to wrap the posts) but the end product turned out nicely. My mom and her husband are happy with it and that is what is most important to me.
