Breakfast Nook Update: The Bench

November 26, 2012 3 Comments

Helloooo! As you may have noticed, I took a few days off for Thanksgiving. 🙂

Since this is the first year in our new house, we hosted Thanksgiving. It was lovely. Needless to say, I was busy, busy, busy! From cooking, to cleaning, to crafting, I was doing it all!

A big part of the “rush” would be because we just finished building our breakfast nook bench! Eeekkk!

It’s turning out wonderful and I can’t wait to show you the end and “final” result.

However, this post if all about building the bench.

Here’s how it went down:

First off, we cleared out the room and pulled up the existing baseboard.

Next, we measured, and double measured, the length of the wall and my Mr. built the bottom frame of the bench.

(P.S.- I totally apologize for all my “orange” pictures… we were mostly doing this project at night and I’m still trying to figure out all the settings on my new camera. Of course, I figured out how to take better pictures at night AFTER this project was over… SORRY!)

As you’ll notice in the above picture, we had to notch around our existing vent. The best way to do this was to build around it.

Once the base of the frame was down, he started adding the sides.

After the sides were up, we added the front and back supports.

Just like the vent, we had to notch around the two electrical outlets…

With the frame finished, my hubby started cutting the MDF for each “box”.

After the front was covered, he started cutting the MDF for the top of the bench. The top of the bench, or lid, sits on top of the frame.

This picture doesn’t show it, but we framed a box around the vent hole and used a narrow roll of insulating foam to go around the bottom of the frame. After that, it was completely air tight and we attached the new vent cover to the front of the bench. Easy peasy!

Once the entire thing was covered with MDF and the lids were cut, we started drilling the holes for the lids.

With the holes drilled, the hubby started trimming out the front.

After caulking, it was finally time to paint!

I know that in my original post I talked about making the bench out of pre-made cabinets. After doing a whole lot of research, I found that it really wasn’t that great of a deal. We needed three cabinets which would have made the cost around $230. And that was just for the cabinets. As well as the price, I really didn’t like the idea of using cabinets. The storage capacity didn’t seem that great and I wasn’t digging the idea of the doors opening into the furniture. I felt like I would have to move the furniture to get the cabinets open, which would make it hard to actually use the bench as storage.

With that in mind, we designed this bench to be a power house for storage. Since the lids open from the top, I can just lift them up and stick things inside. Perfect!

We spent around $90 on the bench, which is WAY better than the $230 that the cabinets would have cost. Plus, I LOVE ours! I can’t even remember the breakfast nook without it. That makes it pretty awesome!

Next up is the cushion. This room is coming together just like I imagined… maybe even better!

Big Smiles!