A while back I met an awesome family while building one of the playhouses for Mini Playhomes.  The playhouse build went great, the kids loved it and the parents were happy.  All good!  Fast forward a few months and the Mom reaches out to me through an Instagram DM about wanting a built-in bench to fit in their bay window in the living room.

I drew up a rendering which is helpful for the client to get a visual of how the piece could look, and it also helps me to be able to figure out material costs.  Doing a rendering can also help me see where I may run into challenges with weird angles or other miscellaneous details.  (Don’t worry…the fabric pattern in the rendering was just a generic option in Sketchup for the sake of the rendering, lol).  But with the design approved I made myself a color-coded cut sheet I got to work.

I’m not going to lie.  There were some challenging parts of this build, but with every challenge comes an opportunity for learning…and learning I did do, haha!  In fact, once i got the whole thing installed, I personally wasn’t happy with how the cushion sat on top of the bench.  There were a couple gaps at the front corners I didn’t like so I did what every perfectionist would do…I built and upholstered an entirely new cushion top.  This time around, I did what I should’ve done the first time and made a template for the exact shape of the walls using some foam-core board (never ever ever assume that a house has straight walls or that a 45-degree angle in the house is ACTUALLY a 45-degree angle).  Using a simple template is very similar to how countertop guys do custom countertops.  This worked great and the new cushion fit much much better.

The carcass of the bench was built using plywood and then the front face was clad in poplar.    I made the drawer boxes from maple and used box joints as my joinery of choice.  I also used soft-close undermount drawer slides and it’s so nice to be able to push those shut and watch as they slow down and close on their own. So. High.  Class.  

The drawer faces were done in a shaker style using poplar and everything was sprayed white using my Graco Magnum X5 airless sprayer (which i’m still getting the hang of). You’ll notice 4 drawer faces but only 2 are actually functioning drawers.  Because of the corner/triangle shape of the ends, I chose not to use drawers there but instead, I made those drawer faces attach with neodymium magnets. This way they can still pull those off and store stuff inside and then they can just snap those drawer faces back in place. Clever, eh?

It’s fun to build, it’s fun to learn, and it’s fun to apply what you learn to use in the next project. If you’re looking for a custom furniture build for your space, whether it’s your home, office or small business, reach out to me with some details of what you’re looking for and we’ll go from there. Thanks for looking!