A no-nail, no lost security deposit kitchen counter extension for renters

I am a recent college graduate living in an apartment in a big, expensive city. Since I don't come from some extremely wealthy family and I didn't invent facebook or anything, it pretty much goes without sayng that my kitchen is TINY.

I cook a lot, and I live with a professional chef -- who cooks a whol lot -- so we were in desperate need of some more counter space. One solution would be to put up some shelves to hold all of the chef's many knives, scales, mixers and other gadgets, but I want my security deposit back so we had to find a solution that didn't involve nailing into the wall.

So I built this counter exension into the useless space between the counter and the fridge. The drawers under the original counter still have no problem opening and we also rolled a set of rolling plastic drawers over to the side of the fridge. All in all, it added a lot of space.

Step 1 Step 1: measure your space, thus deciding your material needs

After we decided to add an extension to the counter, reaching from the permanent counter top to the fridge, we measured the space. The counter sits three feet high, so we'd need two three feet long pieces of wood for the legs, so the extension doesn't slant. The space between the sink and the wall is just over one foot and the distance from the counter to the fridge is about three feet, though the fridge can move a little.

So this yeilds material needs of:

1 three foot by one foot piece of board or plywood
2 three foot lengths of wood suitable for making legs
1 one foot long piece of siding or other material to stabilize the legs

In the two incarnations of our extension we have used
a C-clamp
and a 13 inch by three foot piece of cut granite (obtained for eight dollars from community forklift which is an astounding non-profit that re-sells green and salvaged building materials on the cheap)

Comments

[aliceownsj00]

Woa, now thats genius. I'm planning on moving to an apartment that is nice in size but the kitchen was such an after thought lol this will save me on searching for something lol

[xrobevansx]

That's pretty awesome. Not pretty, not TOTALLY awesome...but pretty awesome none-the-less.

[GroW]

Thanks. I'll take pretty awesome. Yeah, form certainly follows function in this case.