Top Decoration

When we moved down to Arizona in June of 2004 we bought a brand-spanking-new house! I loved this house! It was perfect for our family! I was so sad to have to leave it in November of 2006. But more about that in future posts.
The most exciting part about this house was that it was a blank slate! We had so much fun transforming it to work better and smarter for us!

One of our many projects was to add a window seat in the bay window of our kitchen. (You can see it on the left side of the photo - painted white with the blue pillows sitting on it) We not only wanted it to look great, but to feel like it had always been there and to store and hide all of our kitchen appliances that we didn't use on a daily basis.

Here was our process:

This was the floor to ceiling bay window in our kitchen's eating area...

Our little artist adding his signature before it all got covered up with MDF...

We bolted 2x4's to the walls to be the support system for the seat and created a sturdy front for the facade.

Then we covered the front with MDF. The two corners on top got covered as well. The opening you see is where the lid will sit.
The boys thought it was funny to sit in it with dad...

This is where we had to finish for the night.
He just couldn't wait to sit on the new bench!

We added decorative panels to the front to make it look more polished and pretty, the front span at the floor line got a piece of decorative trim to finish it off and to tie in with our existing floor trim and the whole seat on the front edge also got a decorative routered edge.

It was about 7 feet long so it held A LOT of stuff that we were able to take out of our kitchen cabinets and pantry...

And here is the finished product...

It was a relatively easy project and completely worth every bit of time and money that it took to make it happen! In fact, we loved it so much that we put one in our Master Bedroom where we had a matching floor-to-ceiling bay window! Perfect for storing extra blankets, quilts, pillows, etc.

I highly recommend doing this project if you have the space, like a bay window or nook, that could be used more efficiently. Not only did it give us extra space in our kitchen cabinets for items that we used everyday, but it added a ton of seating to our kitchen...and we all know, when you have a gathering, everyone flocks to the kitchen to socialize!

Has anyone figured out exactly why that is?