How to Build a Cozy Breakfast Nook Bench
After building a cozy breakfast nook bench in our last house when we had a giant open kitchen to fill, I knew I wanted to do the same in our current house.
When we moved in, the dining room was all sectioned off by walls and quite small. But, because it also functioned as a pass-through to get to our playroom, it was a bit of a shuffle to get around the dining table and chairs, and nothing sends me quite like bumping my hip on the edge of a chair.
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Here’s a listing photo from when we moved in:
Once we renovated the kitchen and removed all the walls in this space to make an open plan kitchen/living/dining room combo, this awkward dining room space definitely needed a little something. Enter the cozy breakfast nook bench.
I simplified the design a little from the last time we did this (AKA added a flip-top storage as opposed to drawers), and added a decorative back to make it look more custom. The flip top is actually a lot more functional than drawers were, because we found that it was hard to crawl up under the table to pull out the drawers if we needed something, and flipping up the top is a lot easier to access the inside day-to-day.
Anyway, the dimensions of this piece were really specific to our space, so I’ve made a set of customizable breakfast nook bench plans available to download that’ll use a standard height and depth, but lets you use your own length for each side depending on the size of your room. This took only about a weekend to build, including assembling and painting, and it’s made such a difference.
Constructing the bench
I used the color Garden Wall by Behr which is a muted green that gives enough color to feel like an accent color next to our black kitchen, but it’s still fairly neutral.
Our cozy breakfast nook bench reveal
The end result gives our dining room so much more character than we had before in this boring, blank room. After building a dining bench in two houses now, I firmly believe there should be one in every house!
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