And the island top is stained...

After two coats of Minwax Dark Walnut, our apartment smells very strongly of stain...it's almost suffocating...but I love the way the island top turned out! You really can't see the details from this photo...its actually not as dark as it looks here, but it has a very rustic, distressed look that I love! It looks more like salvaged wood. We've got to put a coat of polyurethane on tonight and it will be finished and ready to install it onto the base cabinets (probably can't do that though until mid-March...so it looks like our kitchen table here is going to be its home for awhile!) Here's a before and after:

Clarification: this is NOT the island under the top...it is resting on our dining room table here in Auburn while we stain it! The base cabinets that we will attach this to is in our house and we have to wait to install after we move in.

Don't worry, we are not going to use this as a real butcher block...we won't be cutting directly on it...so we decided the stain and polyurethane would be ok for our purposes. You can see our template behind this last picture...we just peeled off the laminate from the previous counter top and used that to make our cuts. And please forgive our messy apartment. We have been slowly packing boxes to take a little every time we go to our house so everything is a mess!