One place in your home that can always benefit from extra seating? Your kitchen. Whether you have an eat-in kitchen or a completely separate dining room, it’s important to have enough space for everyone in your home to gather around the table. After all, the kitchen is the heart of the home, and you probably spend a lot of time there, whether you’re chatting over coffee before work, cooking up a delicious family meal, or hosting a dinner party.
If you’re working with a smaller room, look at areas that may just be there and not serving a purpose. Take Zoe Rich’s (@homeatmayvilla) window area for example. After swapping the dining room and kitchen of her historic home to make the most of the space, she was left with an empty area that didn’t make much sense in the new layout.
“The window then stayed behind the island and created dead space,” says Zoe, who shares the home with her partner Ryan and their dog Olive. “We needed extra storage in the kitchen to store things like cloths, larger cooking appliances and this solved our storage problem.”
Zoe and Ryan decided on a completely DIY window seat project to help them achieve their goal of more storage and more practical use of “dead space”.
The built-in bench started with a basic frame.
The couple started by building a frame for the window seat out of standard wood, using MDF to cover the outside. Once the base was made, Zoe and Ryan attached the lid using a piano hinge, which would give them easy access to the storage inside the bench when needed. After the holes were filled and sanded, the last step was priming the wood and paint.
Small touches create a premium look.
What takes the bench the extra mile are the details. Zoe and Ryan added plinths to the bottom of the bench “to give it a custom look” and to blend in with the rest of the kitchen. They decided to paint the same creamy white as their kitchen walls (Little Greene Paint Company’s Slaked Lime) to help the cabinetry blend in completely. homey vibe.
Zoe is delighted with the amount of extra storage the window seat has given and loves the overall vibe it brings to the space. “I love the English country feel it gives our kitchen,” says Zoe. “The fact that it’s completely custom built and we built it gives us a real sense of pride.”
Inspired? Submit your own project here.