Two weeks ago we began working on one of the easy fixes on our list.
Our house has a decent sized dining room but over the last four years, as we have grown the number of people/animals in this space, I have started to notice that it is feeling smaller and smaller. We do not have an eat-in kitchen, so our dining room tends to be like Grand Central Station. My first thought was to scale down the size of the furniture we have in that room but quickly realized that that didn't make much sense. Our dining room table is an average size for a family of four and can be a tight squeeze when we have company over, so getting anything smaller wouldn't fly. Not to mention the fact that new dining room furniture is not in the budget!
I needed a more cost effective solution. Enter Pinterest.
I started looking at different dining rooms on Pinterest, searching for some sort of inspiration to fix our little problem. I needed to utilize the space better and possibly achieve additional seating. It wasn't long before I stumbled on a solution.
We were going to build a banquette bench.
Building a banquette bench in the corner of our dining room would allow us to push the dining room table out of the center of the space and into the corner, thus opening up the room. Goal #1 achieved.
Having a banquette bench wrap around half of our table would add four additional seats, letting us sit eight people at our table that previously seated four. Moving the table from the center of the room into the corner also made room for bar stools at the kitchen counter, win. win. Goal #2 achieved.
Saturday morning Steve got to work measuring out the lengths that we wanted the bench to be. We used this tutorial as a guide and made subtle adjustments to fit our space. After a trip to Lowes, a lot of wood cutting and sanding and lots of hammering we had the frame to our bench built.
From there Steve added the exterior pieces, trim and top. Then it was all in my hands. I added two coats of white paint, bought cushions and a few pillows and we were in business!
Building the banquette bench and rearranging the dining room also freed up tons of wall space. Wall space that was begging to become a gallery wall. Well wall, ask and you shall receive.
I am thrilled with the way the bench turned out and am even more excited to have a functional dining room!
