Kitchen Banquette

Building this banquette was so much fun. Honestly, I love this stuff!

 

It started with the idea...

We had a pub table in our kitchen with two chairs.

 

 

It was a nice setup, but I got to thinking that it would be a good idea to have seating for more than jus two people. A banquette came to mind! It really was the perfect idea, didn't think it would be difficult to build either. This would seat more people and also add some much needed storage space!

 

The first step was to take some measurements and to draw up plans.

Since this banquette is in the shape of an "L", we constructed two boxes. The boxes were built using 3/4" birch plywood. This is a diagram of the cuts we needed to make.

 

Many thanks to the nice man at Lowe's who made all these cuts for us!

 

We constructed both boxes in less than two hours. Piece of cake! 

Now we needed to go back to Lowe's for hinges and a sheet of MDF. It is very important to hold off on cutting the lids until the boxes are built!! I used MDF for the lids because it sands up really nice (and easily too) and I also wanted the MDF to trim out the boxes...this really added to the finished product! So, we attached the lids and all the trim pieces, and that was it...finished our banquette in one day!

 

Did I say that was it? Just kidding, we're not done yet...

 

The next step was to sand...and sand...and sand...and then sand some more lol! I spent hooouuurrrs sanding this bench, but in the end it was worth it! Thank goodness for my orbital sander, what a great tool! A summary of what I did: rounded the edges on the lid, applied wood putty to all the seams (so they all disappeared, seamless look is awesome), then sanded the seams, sanded the whole bench with 80 grit then 150 then 220. It looked amazing after all that hard work but one more thing had to be done to the banquette...paint. I primed the bench, sanded with 220 grit and then put two coats of high gloss white paint on it. NOW we're done!

 

 

Again, I had so much fun building this banquette...I think Craig might have enjoyed it as well! :)

 

For anyone who would like to build their own banquette, here is a link to the site with detailed construction instructions.