As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been tying up some loose ends in the kitchen recently, which has freed me to start a new project. My wife, Dani, has asked me to make a corner storage bench for the sunroom as a birthday present to her. This is a bit of a sneaky move on her part, because she’s wanted one of these for a while, but by asking for it as a birthday gift (admittedly a belated one) she’s managed to bump it to the top of the projects list. She’s a wily one.
She recently repainted the sunroom, which I think she’s going to do a post about. We’d both like to see the room put to use other than as a temporary kitchen or a tool storage area. The room is a bit awkward, because it serves as the primary entrance to our house, but it’s supposed to be a relaxing room.
We’ve decided to put a rather large corner storage bench in the…well..the corner. We think it will look great, and it will be very functional for things like parties and holiday dinners.
That’s the corner we’ll be putting it in. The room is in a state of disarray as it’s just been painted. If you’re quick enough to notice that there is a chainsaw at the door and snow on the ground outside, it’s because we lost some branches from the recent snow storm, and I need to go out there and take care of it. I placed the saw there this morning hoping I’d be motivated to do so…. yeah, not so much.
I’ve been playing with Google SketchUp recently. It’s a very nice 3d modeling tool for designing just about anything; and it’s free. It has a bit of an initial learning curve, but after I got the hang of it I could do some pretty cool things. I used it to design the bench seat. Here’s the design as it exists right now.
The higher end-piece there has cubbies for shoe storage. If you look closely at the first picture, you can see that the far left end piece has a notch in it. That’s to accommodate the baseboard heater that you can see in the picture of the corner we will be putting this in.
This past weekend, I went to Home Depot and dropped a lot of money for the supplies and tools that I needed to build this thing. Probably about the same amount of money it would have cost to buy one from the Amish Market, but at least I’ll have the tools and learning experience to take on to my next project.
So hopefully sometime this week I’ll get started on this. I need to sit down and bust through our taxes first, though.
